A Web-Exclusive Video with Roxy Paine

Used with permission from James Cohan Gallery. All rights reserved.

Tod Williams It seems to me that you are building things up continuously rather than breaking them down.

RP Well, fractionation is the first step. You have the component parts, and then you can recombine them into new compounds.

TW So the fractionation is not an end in itself.

RP No, it’s the first step. I would like my work to examine this drive that humans have to constantly break things down into their component parts and isolate them further and further. It’s just kept accelerating in the past couple hundred years. We started out being concerned with things that moved so we could hunt and eat, and then slowly we began to understand that matter is composed of molecules; molecules are composed of atoms; atoms are composed of neutrons, protons and electrons; and now we have found that neutrons and protons are composed of quarks; and soon I’m quite sure we will find that quarks are composed of something else.

— from BOMB’s interview of Roxy Paine by Tod Williams & Billie Tsien, Spring 2009, Issue 107, available on newsstands everywhere. Subscribe today!

 

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This interview is used with permission from James Cohan Gallery. All rights reserved.

 

 

Read the text interview with Roxy Paine by Tod Williams & Billie Tsien in BOMB 107, Spring 2009, available on newsstands everywhere. Subscribe today!