How to Kill a Buddha (and Other Received Ideas)
This series of sculptures echo and respond to the antique Chinese sculptures of Buddhist figures collected by Walter Munthe, now housed at the Permanenten West Norway Museum of Decorative Art. The works are assemblages of sculptural impressions–fragments “printed” by pressing black aluminum foil onto the more permanent originals–to capture direct, crude impressions of various gestures, poses and symbolic details, evoking ghostly doubles of the marble sculptures on display and creating new figures from objects hidden in the archive. How to Kill a Buddha (and other Received Ideas) is a perverse critique of the colonial practice of collection and preservation, and presents a tactile mode of working with a museum collection or archive.