CURATOR’S PERSPECTIVE Tamara Joy, Chief Curator, MoAS
It’s a pleasure to finally come to the opening of Stephen’s, Shoosty Bugs, An Art Infesta - tion. I want to echo Tabitha’s thanks to all of my colleagues. We could not do this without each other. So, thank you all my friends and colleagues, and welcome, Stephen Shooster and his wife Diane and the family. We’ve been working with Stephen for more than a year on discussing and planning the show. In the beginning, the staff had been formulating an idea of bugs everywhere in the museum, in a few different, various ways. And as Tabitha mentioned, during these dis -
ing assistant. I taught textile science, and I looked at a lot of fibers through a magnify - ing glass. And I knew that silk was this su - per fiber. And I thought, Why are you using this as a canvas? As we started talking about silk, I mentioned some silk books that I had read, and you know, he’s very interested, and correct me if I’m wrong, Stephen, I think you downloaded or bought one or two books, and I think you read them in a day. And we got back and started talking about it, and you were just so excited, and his love of learning, and his openness to integrating new ideas, you know, that’s the heart of an artist. Then, a few months later, we were talking, and we found out that we both had studied pa - per making in Japan. What are the odds of that? And so both of these, the origins of silk go back to 4,000 BC, an old ma - terial, life-changing, civiliza - tion changing, as was paper and you know we were talking more about that connection with silk and his work and again, correct me if I’m wrong, those talks about silk, and the further investigation, inspired you to make the silk moth scarf which I am wearing, and it is 100 percent silk. Wow, I mean it’s kind of like all here. It’s the cycle of life and death. You’ve got the silk - worm, you’ve got the silk cocoon, you know the spinning of the silk, and the silk moth. It’s like it’s all here. It’s the symbol of transfor - mation and renewal, and I grabbed this silk early on, when Stephen brought a few for us, It’s like, That’s mine! And so it’s a storyboard, it’s “Wear the Art, Be the Movement,” that’s one of Stephen’s taglines.
cussions, Zach and Tabitha had already seen some of Stephen’s work. I think everybody just said, you know, this is it. This is the thing the key that will hold it all together, Shoosty Bugs. I was first introduced to Shoosty Bugs by Zach. I don’t know where he got it, but he showed it to us and it’s a big beautiful computer bug, The Integrated Goliath CPU . You will meet him in the gallery lat - er. What intrigued me was this high-tech digitally created im - age was using silk as a canvas. I’m a textile person, so, you
Silk: A World History by Aarathi Prasad
know, that hooked me right away. Just the idea of using this work to integrate science and art—that’s perfect for us. And in Shoosty Bugs , we were able to ask questions like, How do we embrace technology and stay connect- ed to the natural world? Stephen embraces inspiration from all me - dia and he communes with AI, but those building blocks, those old materials, silk, for example resonates with me. When we first started talking about how to interpret the show I went back to my own training. I was in grad school. I was a teach -
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