The video installation Copycat follows a legal dispute between the artist and filmmaker Sarah Morris and six origami artists.
Sarah Morris argues with the plaintiffs’ lawyer about her series “Origami”, in which she took the crease patterns of various origami artists and reproduced them as large, colorful paintings. While both parties claim justice is on their side, the judiciary seems interested only in an orderly legal process.
The fictionalized retelling negotiates questions of intellectual property, copyright and artistic process, and ultimately ends without setting a precedent. Meanwhile, the spectators, each referring to an artwork whose copyright status is similarly complicated, allude to a conflicted history between property and thought.
In contrast, the small, colorful origami figures suggest a different way out. These objects, titled In Love with Sarah Morris and Noboru Miyajima (or the respective origami artist), are reprints of Sarah Morris’s “Origami” paintings, folded back into the figures they were meant to become.
