Spleen Unvented 

What happens when a sculpture breathes but does not speak? When it swells with air but releases nothing?

 

In Spleen Unvented, Mike Pelletier presents a body  that inhales endlessly, an artificial organism suspended between inflation and restraint. The work plays with the absurdity of the phrase “venting one’s spleen,” reversing it: nothing is vented. Instead, this creature fills and fills, bloats and expands, becomes an organism of held tension. It breathes, but it says nothing.

 

The sculpture is born from the digital, designed in virtual space, animated through simulation, and then translated into physical form. It recalls the Frankensteinian logics of VFX: disassembled bones, fabricated guts, invented organs. Yet there’s tenderness here too, a deep fascination with the inner world of invented anatomies. These are not machines, though they flirt with machinic rhythms. They are bodies with memory.

 

That memory is personal: the Canadian dump near Prince Albert where Pelletier’s father refurbished broken furniture. Pig guts. Neon. Ashes. He speaks of “bright decay”, of magical trash. This tension between abject and luminous speaks throughout the work. Floppy appendages twitch with uncanny grace; surfaces glisten with “pretty obscene” color palettes that hover between beautiful and grotesque. Alive and dead. Natural and artificial.

 

Behind the motion is a puppeteer’s hand, captured in motion data, encoded in parameters, dancing between automation and automatism. Pelletier sculpts in VR, inside hypnotic isolation. His is an “unvented” automatism: surreal in its quiet, guided not by narrative but by rhythm, tension, and the ghost of instinct.
 

This is a sculpture that doesn’t rest. It loops. It pulses.