Photo by Mark Dion

Some of the many items Mark Dion collects and stores in his New York apartment

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"I think some people generate ideas better in an empty room, where there are no distractions," says Mark Dion, as we sit in a small clearing amid the decidedly unempty rooms of the Upper Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife, the artist Dana Sherwood. "I don’t see these things as distractions, though," Dion observes of the teeming tchotchkes that fill his living space. "I see them as elements that feed into the thought process. So I prefer to have as much stuff around me as possible." The crimson-walled dining room in which we’re meeting on this autumn morning certainly bears this out: great towers of books teeter in corners; an array of old scissors hangs, with just a touch of Damoclean menace, on a wall over the 47-year-old artist’s shoulder; a phalanx of cabinets in an adjacent hallway is stuffed with countless small-bore curiosities; and silently overseeing the cluttered kingdom, a stuffed peacock perches in the corner.

The place feels like the lair of an obsessive Victorian scholar — fittingly, perhaps, given Dion’s status as the contemporary artworld’s preeminent collector and exhibitor of found objects. Whether unearthed using archaeolog-ical methods (an excavation, for instance, on the Midtown Manhattan construction site of the then-new Museum of Modern Art for a "Projects" show mounted there in 2005) or gathered via practices that echo the collecting explorations of pioneering botanists and zoologists (such as a recently concluded multimonth project that loosely retraced the travels of Revolutionary War-era naturalist William Bartram), the eclectic materials Dion accumulates are sorted into resonant taxonomic categories and then displayed in installation settings often evocative of the generatively heterogeneous Wunderkammern of the protoscientific era.

"I’m always out there looking for stuff," says Dion. Some of his collections represent long-standing fascinations, like the wooden mallets or oilcans that Dion keeps at his Pennsylvania farm. But he frequently initiates new collections too, he says, typically on his far-flung travels. Such is the case with some recent finds he shows off in his jam-packed storage room-cum-studio, including an assortment of nuts and seeds, a selection of tiny toy guns inscribed with names like Dick and Pal, and, nestled within a lidded box, a clutch of, um, hairballs. "Every category of things is so voraciously consumed, so you have to find one that no one else has zeroed in on," he explains.

Also among this eclectic array is Dion’s miniature-finial collection, several dozen of which reside on a dusty shelf in a hallway cabinet, jostling for space with a selection of tiny inkwells. Finials are architectural elements that typically ornament spires or gables of buildings; in the domestic realm, smaller versions such as these decorate things like the tips of curtain rods. But Dion says he’s not intrigued by them from the perspective of archaeology or history. "I got interested in them largely because of my interest in memorials, I think, and their formal similarities to some types of grave architecture, to funeral urns," he says. "I like how they appear to be something they’re not. And I’m mixing things that don’t really go together. The ones with the holes, for instance, are actually pulls for curtains, and there may be one or two chess pieces in there, as well. It’s very impure."

A sense of strategic impurity informs Dion’s artwork, as well. "A layperson coming into my show might interpret that I’m making a mistake, putting things together that don’t really go together. And so they assume I must have a different reason for organizing things as I do." One such reason, says Dion, is to get people thinking about how conventional museums operate by contra-vening their methods. "It doesn’t make sense to just recapitulate what already exists. I have to try to do it in a way that activates the viewer and gives them a place to find themselves — they can see each thing a little better that way."