Nicolás Lamas, Extended mind, 2025

2025

Medium

Hockey helmet and coral

Dimensions

33 × 22 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-156156

Nicolas Lamas' sculptures, composed of organic elements, precisely produced structures, and used everyday objects, resemble hybrid artifacts that connect different timelines. They reflect the artist’s interest in archaeology and the development of technological achievements over millennia. “Technology continues to advance and looks toward the future, while archaeology is a discipline that, by definition, constantly gathers data from the past through the material traces left by our ancestors. However, we sometimes forget that both the past and the future are in constant evolution.” The assemblages thus open dialogues about transience, hybridity, and the separation of culture and nature. At first glance, the different materials appear to be in opposition to each other, but upon closer examination, they reveal formal and thematic similarities. For the artist, the individual elements possess their own power, making the distinction between man-made and organically grown irrelevant. Through these encounters, Lamas seeks to relativize the function and value of objects, opening up new ways to redefine their existence. “Extended mind” (2025) consists of a white field hockey helmet from which a coral appears to grow. The helmet acts like a protective armor for the oceanic organism and together they form a hybrid unit in which artificial and grown materials merge. „In the end everything changes and moves, everything is in transition to another state or level. In that sense, conditions such as the living and the inert, the unique and the massive, the organic and the synthetic, the material and the virtual, the transcendent and the banal, the human and the non-human, are categories that are constantly mutating and relativizing.“