Artist: Lori Nix and dioramas of diorama-making

In line with these miniature things, someone in my animal class posted a link to this artist on facebook.

Lori Nix website

This is totally within that realm of really strange, eerie places that seem to be vaguely narrative and magical and mysterious. I love them! Especially the fact that she did this whole series called Unnatural History or something with dioramas of behind-the-scenes natural history museums.

This is really funny. :)

This reminds me of that lovely song by Regina Spektor about a lake and the genius. 

There are deer next to this one!

Charles LeDray

Perhaps the very very best thing about the trip to NYC was seeing Charles LeDray's completely magical show at the Whitney, which I have been able to find at least some images of via the wonders of intornets, becuase the book associated with the show (workworkworkwork) is like 45 dollars and the photos are of an installation in maybe London or something anyway. Point is, that the work was amazing. There were basically three components -- these minature clothing pieces, tiny things carved out of bone, and miniscule wheel-thrown pottery. Also, he used to make his own stuffed animals, so there were some weird ones of those too. This is definitely one of those things that I am thrilled to have seen, because it is not nearly as striking in the photos as it was in real life. Breathtaking really. Anyway, here they are:

Imagine this maybe the size of an American girl doll. . . tiny leather gloves

This thrift-store basement tableau thing was the most phenomenal, magical finale of the whole show. It was in a huge room that was completely black, so that the only light came from the little drop ceilings (complete with dust in the lights)

This is a really small mattress . . . like maybe the size of a large sheet of paper? that is sewn perfectly and drapped with all the jackets from a party.

Small spaces: A few things that are diorama-like

I came across a couple of works that play with scale in a way that is totally unexpected and wonderful.

First, an artist by the name of Dan Lavitt, who does these really odd miniature room things that have some things at a smaller scale and some things at life size scale . . . and then puts people in the spaces . . .

And then this photo from the LaChapelle studio . . . 

Artist: Jean Lowe

Another artist featured in the "Next of Kin" show that I thought was particularly noteworthy was Jean Lowe, who created a room installation that was a "send-up" of French Rococo or Neoclassical Salons . . . she makes papier mache furniture, books, props, etc. and hand paints them, but in this very obviously hand-made sort of way, so that was looks like a big set piece sort of breaks down. For her installation in the show, she did one called "Gentlemen's Club" that discussed the use of apes in the medical research and entertainment industry by creating this club room with hand-painted books in it. Around the room, she created a "four paneled narrative" through the use of a faux wallpaper mural depicting "habitat destruction, transplantation, institutional settings, and species survival strategies" (30). The author, Ron Platt, says her use of this loose hand-made style is a strategy for being too over-the-top or direct with her message, saying"The humor and hand-made touch charm us into considering her environmentally proactive message which might otherwise be dismissed as too heavy-handed or didactic."

The particular piece in the show wasn't online, and the image in the catalog wasn't very interesting either, so I'll just stick a couple of other examples here.

Here's a blog with a few more images of her paintings of these proposed(?) (or maybe realized) because I may have seen a photo of the real thing . . . spaces of European elegance that she puts big-box store items into.

Artist: Richard Ross: Museology

As I decide how much I want to be engaged with this museum slash institutional conventions (and in what way) I think it would make sense to take note of a photographer who was featured in the "Next of Kin: Looking at the Great Apes" exhibition (and therefore that I found out about in the exhibition catalog, which had essays by Harriet Ritvo, Tommy L. Lott, and Ron Platt and artist entries by Ron Platt, from the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge,and the show ran from October 7 - December 10, 1995.)

The photographer, Richard Ross, travels around photographing museum displays as part of his Museology project. The photos in the show were American Museum of Natural History, New York, (1977) and Museum of Natural History, Cairo, Egypt, 1984. The New York one shows the image of the mountain gorillas exhibit done by Carl Akeley and show the triad of father, mother, and child that other people have talked about before in terms of the museum's reinforcement of certain societal values.

He talks about how Akeley was on the expedition to kill the gorillas, and then says: "Given the symbolic parallels between guns and cameras, and between taxidermy's and photography's bravura for freezing of time and matter, Ross' image provides a dizzying headful of equations masquerading as straightforward re-presentation" (22)

The second photo is described as depicting our relationship of disregard and care for other animals by leaving these "moth-eaten" specimens in such a profoundly un-natural and sad environment.

After looking him up, he apparently has a website where he shows all these Museology images, and they have been published as a book (which maybe I should check out!)

There were a couple that were really compelling to me, so I'll copy them below.

What I love about this one is that I still can't figure out what that thing is, or why someone put it on that hanger. It makes me think about the "unexpected" that was talked about in my review (or the loss of the unexpected, rather) and how much unexpectedness is present in these photos.

This makes me think about building things but leaving parts off, or having extra parts laying around.

This is just so strikingly beautiful. And with all of these its so interesting to look at the stands they are on or carts or cases. 

The thing I loved about this one is that it seems as though they are all coming towards the glass, like little delicate-footed zombies with beady black eyes, ready to investigate our interrupting them. 

Artist: Thomas Grunfeld

I came across the name Thomas Grunfeld and think his hybrid chimera creations are so lovely and strange that I wanted to collect a bunch of images of them here.

Also, there is this great website which I may have catalogued here before, Ravishing Beasts, that shows a lot of taxidermy images in its gallery, both of art taxidermy, but also museum displays. So this might be a really good place to look for reference images.

And now, some images.