NEW YORK—New York-based artist Roxy Paine makes computer-driven machines that mechanically produce paintings and sculptures; he also creates hand-crafted replications of nature that are startlingly realistic. His work toys with assumptions about nature vs. culture and organic vs. artificial; it often confounds the distinction between the man-made and the natural.

His lifelike mushroom sculptures, life-size stainless-steel trees and machine-made art have been exhibited worldwide, including in the original Greater New York show at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center in 2000, and the Whitney Biennial in 2002. He is currently featured in Ecstasy: In and about Altered States, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles and is working on a new site-specific commission for New York's Madison Square Park.

Artinfo caught up with him as he was installing his show at New York’s James Cohan Gallery, which opens January 14.

I was struck by the way the weed garden in your new show turns what would normally be an abomination into something appealing. Was that your intention?

That’s a big part of what I’m trying to do. Weed-Choked Garden is someone’s attempt at a garden, but it is completely overgrown. The weeds are doing the best—although they are also being eaten. In a way, there’s this same sort of conflict in my work, between this human desire to create a perfect, manageable thing—like a grid or a row or the garden—and nature’s other structures, which have their own logic but can’t be contained. So there are these other organic structures in there, with these interconnections, with these different species coexisting.

What draws you to that side of nature, to the weeds and fungi? We tend to think of them as the ominous and less pleasing side. If someone saw your garden in an abandoned lot…

They would ignore it or step on it probably.

But you redeem that side of nature, making it seem as if it’s very easy to make a pretty flower, and difficult to make this ugly weed.

I think that’s true. It has to do with taking the normal mode of perception, trying to jog myself out of that and find the beautiful in what’s not normally considered so. When I started dealing with the kinds of mold that grow on these weeds for example, I initially thought it was repulsive, but then I started to see these structures inside of it, and these colors, and realized it is quite beautiful.

So much of what we consider beautiful or not beautiful is, of course, just conditioned by culture. But it’s also constantly in flux, since our notions of what is beautiful or what is disgusting are always changing. But rather than say “the disgusting is beautiful,” I just want it to be a mediation on how we think and why we have these categories.

The other part of that is the painting and sculpture machines. You add a third element to the nature vs. the manmade equation, and that’s the machine. You have robots making something that is supposed to be a creative, a human act, whereas you make something with your hands that looks entirely organic.

Yes, mass-production is supposed to create sameness and a consistent object. I’m trying to play with that perception. And there are things like the Erosion Machine in the show. It’s this machine that is eroding a large sandstone block. I’m using this robot similar to those used in General Motors factories, to direct this blast of air with a silicone medium that is slowly eroding the stone.

That’s both what time does to a rock and how sculpture is made.

Yeah, it’s like carving —there’s that notion that an artist like Michaelangelo would look at the block of stone and see the form inside of it. But actually, this is even more removed from the hand because I’m using different data sets to determine the movement of the arm. The first block will use weather data, from a particular time and place—wind-speed, hours of sunlight, temperature, precipitation—to determine how and at what angle the arm will move over the surface of the rock. That’s the way it’s being controlled. But of course, to a very large extent, things cannot be controlled, because of the dynamics involved. But more importantly, because of the structures that are inherent in the stone. There are these ridges already within it, so what is being revealed by the robot is partly the essential nature of the stone. It’s like seeing the recording of the natural processes of the planet. That stone was created in a dune field in Utah 300 million years ago; the ridges are the way the sand was deposited by the wind blowing over it.