looking down on a country full of suggestive names and ancient memories and implied stories (especially if you are exhilarated by a beautiful walk and have a flask in your pocket), shows you the world as a very smooth place, fairly rubbed so by human use., 1993

About the Work

Jimmie Durham’s sculptural assemblages made of quite different materials are fantastical figures, both animal and human. Teeth, bones and sometimes entire animal skulls become part of his works. The artist plays with the appropriation of cultural identities; in his creative output, he explores religious rituals as well as one of the original Native American tribes, the Cherokees, with whom he feels an affiliation. This disturbing, richly allusive object is a self-portrait as both animal and consumer object; it derives its essential vitality from the perturbing mixture of the familiar and the inscrutably foreign.