Hawkinson, who moved several years ago from downtown Los Angeles to this modest town at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, had never before created work based around a single theme. But he agreed to do so for the Getty, forming the new pieces around the idea of a psychiatric condition that has intrigued him for several years, zoopsia, in which people hallucinate animals, sometimes during delirium tremens.
"The pink elephant thing," he said, adding that the basic idea was akin in some ways to his way of working.
"I often — not really hallucinate — but I see something that I think is one thing but it's actually another thing," he said, "and I realize the visual slip and find it kind of intriguing."
For instance the idea for the skeleton — made partly from a children's clay manufactured by Crayola — came to him when he and his wife and daughter visited the Natural History Museum in London and gazed up at a brontosaurus skeleton.
"The vertebrae all the sudden suggested Polynesian oarsmen in a canoe," he said, adding that he has named the piece Leviathon, suggesting both monster and manmade enigma. (The "head" of the skeleton is actually the figure of a very thin man, somewhat resembling Hawkinson, crouched with his knees drawn up, the legs forming the mandibles of the jaw and his curved back the brow and nose.)
Taken together the pieces work as a kind of natural-history diorama gone very wrong. But the plastic-bag bat, with its beady twist-tie eyes, will undoubtedly generate the most rubbernecking at the Getty, where it will be suspended at around eye level and lighted dramatically from below.
As he stared at it closely the other day, touching its "fur" — also pieces of RadioShack bags, painstakingly shredded into hairs with a razor blade — Hawkinson said that some of his neighbors had been by to see it and seemed to like it. But then again, strange creatures emerging from the Hawkinson residence are nothing new by now.
"It's just a suburban neighborhood," he said, "with this kind of scary artist in the backyard."
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