Remember those school days when you did crafty assignments of cutting-pasting pictures from textbooks & magazines? While it might look like an ancient art-form to the i-generation kids, there are some people like artist Andrea Mastrovito who have taken this cut-paste technique to a whole new level.
Mastrovito has created a mind blowing installation by assembling hundreds of pictures of plants and animals cut out from over 700 old textbooks. Titled “The Island of Dr. Mastrovito“, the installation was partly inspired by H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which the archetypal “mad” scientist experiments upon animals in order to give them human traits.
In this ‘Paper Island’, Mastrovito substitutes himself as a doctor who aims at giving a new life to subjects that once lived in a different way (books from paper, paper from wood, and wood from trees). Mastrovito imagines that the outside fauna take control of the abandoned house and become its proper inhabitants. This trompe-l’oeil, or paper diorama also aims at portraying the strength of visuals through which we can create and re-create a world that we can only imagine.
