Mike Libby
A multi-disciplinary artist who makes highly detailed sculptures, collages, and drawings. Through diverse materials and methodologies, Libby explores themes of science, nature, fantasy, history and autobiography. By employing strategies of misinterpretation, reorganization and remediation to readymade and natural objects, Libby highlights illogical and acute correspondences between the real and unreal, the mundane and the imagines.
For the past 5 years, alongside his main body of work, Libby has developed Insect Lab- an extensive body of work in which real preserved insects are customized with antique watch parts and electronic components. Borrowing from fields of science fiction and science fact, these technologically adorned specimens are rich with content and visual wonder. While maintaining the natural beauty, forms and colors of each insect specimen, Insect lab is reminiscent of images from both popular culture and modern scientific developments.
Libby graduated with a degree in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999 and has since attended the Vermont Studio Center and was artist-in-residence at the University of Maine at Orono. He has been in many solo and group exhibits, throughout the United States and Canada, including the Center for Main Contemporary Art 2006 Biennial, and Signs of Our Times exhibit at the Goldstein Museum in 2007. He has been published in the New York Times, Playboy, Hi-Fructose, Nature, Geek Monthly and other international publications of art and design and his work is in collections worldwide.
