La Fontaine, 2007

From an early age, Mark Dion cultivated an authentic interest in biology, entomology, and museums of natural history. Initially his focus on a growing body of information about damages connected to the exploitation of the earth’s resources found concrete form in works that were explicitly and didactically ecological in approach, about the destruction of tropical forests. But the installations at natural history museums and the way they represent knowledge through the arrangement of objects and specimens soon emerged as his preponderant interest. This approach has allowed the artist to examine systems of scientific knowledge and their museum displays from a Foucauldian viewpoint, that is, in terms of an analysis of conservative cultural practices of power. [...]