Since 1991, Michael Joo has used materials such as urine, natural and synthetic sweat and salt, sprouting seeds, live and dead deer, and transparent plastic deities to explore themes of transformation, evolution, and shamanism in his drawings, sculptures, installations, and performance-based videos. As seen in this first career survey, though there are direct references to Duchamp’s assisted readymade (as in Improved Rack #1, [Moose], 1999) and to Beuys’s ritualized and romanticized sociopolitical ephemeral props (as in Unpack, 2003), Joo also posits his own brand of intriguing and often darkly