Michael  Crowder

 

 

 

​The Mariposa mori series can be seen as a visual meditation on ideas of the fragile, the fleeting, beauty lost, and memory transformed.  These impossibly delicate-looking cast glass butterflies have been stripped of their most obvious enchantment—their beautiful color and patterns—and now remain as mere ghosts of their former selves, all the more striking despite their loss.

 

The project organically grew over a number of years from a single butterfly sculpture to an an immersive installation when shown with a library wall backdrop and velvet drapes as a fully realized cabinet of curiosities.  Those early collections amassed by obsessively driven princes and dukes were the precursors to the modern museum. Butterflies naturally serve as the perfect vehicle for examining our collecting impulse to have and to hold.  In these very carefully arranged compositions, there is often an empty space left intentionally in anticipation of the most important piece in any collection: the elusive last one that hasn’t been found…yet.