WUNDERKAMMER: The Cabinet of Curiosity Show

I'm very excited to have curated the Toronto Etsy Street Team Gallery's first group art show, WUNDERKAMMER: The Cabinet of Curiosities from May 11 to 28. This art - or science art - show, is inspired by the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosity, the immense, eccentric, encyclopedic natural history collections gathered by collectors since the Renaissance. Cabinets of Curiosities featured treasured zoological, botanical, anatomical, fossil and gem specimen, collected by early citizen scientists. WUNDERKAMMER features original sculptures, drawings, hand-bound books, prints, paintings, printmaking, ceramics, jewellery, generative and multimedia specimen of natural and unnatural history on all scales, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. We are featuring the work of local artists (myself included):

István Aggott Hönsch			Erin Candela
Gavin Canning			Andrée Chénier
Carolyn Eady			Leslie Fruman
Monika Millar			Heather Ibbott
Colleen Manestar			Peggy Muddles
Teodora Opris			Christine Strait-Gardner
Tosca Teran			Rovena Tey
Lauren Vartanian			Ele Willoughby

Explore our curiousity cabinet of wildlife biology, mathematics, chemistry, mycology, micro and cellular biology, marine biology, entomology, botany, and fantastical lifeforms through the lens of art.

Join us Saturday, May 13, 6:00 pm to 10:00 for our Opening! FOLLOW THE LINK TO RSVP

Naturalia & Mirabilia

French textile artist Lyndie Dourthe creates what she calls 'Naturalia & Mirabilia' - both marvels and natural history in her miniature cabinet of curiosity. She describes how in her secret laboratory she creates jewelry, soft sculpture and installations with a hint of botany, voodoo, anatomy, and superstition. Like any naturalist, she sorts, labels and boxes her specimens and treasures. Her jewelry also serve as childlike talismans.

Lyndie Dourthe - Source: lyndiedourthe.monsite-orange.fr

Lyndie Dourthe - Source: lyndiedourthe.monsite-orange.fr via minouette

Lyndie Dourthe - Source: lyndiedourthe.monsite-orange.fr via minouette

Lyndie Dourthe - Source: lyndiedourthe.monsite-orange.fr via minouette

Lyndie Dourthe -Source: lyndiedourthe.monsite-orange.fr via minouette

Lyndie Dourthe -Source: lyndiedourthe.monsite-orange.fr via minouette

I've long admired her work and can't imagine why I haven't written about her before! Check out her portfolio, blog, and shop.

Glass Wunderkammer

Danish artist Steffen Dam works wonders in glass to create masterful, luminuous art, like glass wunderkammer (or cabinets of curiousity). His subject matter are precisely what every wunderkammer collector would want: botanicals, bottled marine creatures including jellyfish, fossils, egg specimens, though these specimens have been gathered from within his own mind, inspired but not dictated by natural history. This creative area where art meets science is where I want to live. They make me wish I knew how to work in glass.


Biological Panel, blue. 2009.


The secret life of plants. 2006.


SMALL BOX 2. 2010.
glass/wood/lighting fixture
12 X 12 X 9 in. (30.48 X 30.48 X 22.86 cm)


12 JARS. 2009.
glass/wood
14 3/4 X 41 X 9 3/4 inches


Marine Group. Commision for The Museum of Art and Design. New York, NY, USA.


FOSSIL PANEL. 2009.
glass/metal
19 X 35 X 8 in. (48.26 X 88.9 X 20.32 cm)


EGG BLOCK. 2010.
glass
8 1/2 X 14 X 1 1/2 in. (21.59 X 35.56 X 3.81 cm)

Find more wonderous things at his site or at theHeller Gallery {via Lady Lavona's Cabinet of Curiosities}

Insect Fantasia

This reminds me of The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience by Celeste Olalquiaga, a fascinating book tracing the history of kitsch and linking it to a sense of loss. In a sense, it's all about death. It seems to me that this installation is about loss of these insects and their habitat, loss of childhood wonder, and loss of Victorian 'innocence' (if such a thing existed).

{via bioephemera}

Atlas Obscura

Via Blue Tea comes this welcome news: "Josh Foer of the Athanasius Kircher Society and Dylan Thuras of Curious Expeditions have teamed up to launch the Atlas Obscura, an ambitious, user-driven catalog of curiosities, wonders, and oddities around the world."

Check it out! Because what this world needs is more wonder cabinets. You heard it here.

Tea time ...headware and beasts with five fingers

Well, synchronicity is always entertaining, I find. After posting about creatures as headware and the omnipresence of tea in popular culture, I find this week, artists can combine the creature and tea trends.

There are blogs I check, for pretty pictures, even if I do not (or cannot) read them, like the this one which used to be more bilingual (the tea-mind of Irene) but I believe is now strictly Romanian... which links to a site in Japanese, so I cannot provide much information, as my Romanian is non-existent and my Japanese, shall we generously say, is primitive. The source of this photo is Garbo (whatever that means), and this appears to be a girl dressed as a teaparty. I mean, forget the animals, THIS is a hat (delightfully paired with a necklace of dainty cookies):


If you are not one to take your tea party with you, on your head, perhaps you could train it to follow you where ever you go?




This Hybrid Tea Set are designed by Israeli ceramic artist Ronit Baranga for the “Dining in 2015″ competition of designboom.
[via News of the Craft and Style Blogosphere via Lady Lavona's Cabinet of Curiosity]

Rhinogrades and Wunderkammer

The image shows the Nasobema lyricum, aka
"Snouter" the from the folklore section of the Haus der Natur
(House of Nature), a natural history collection in
Salzburg, Austria, uploaded by Curious Expeditions

The hole in my web-browsing-life left by the disappearance of the Proceedings of the Anathasius Kircher Society has been partially filled by the discovery [via the Storque's News of the Craft and Style Blogosphere] of The Curious Expeditions. Ironically, the upper photo has been in my flickr faves for months, but I never had the sense to check out the profile of the photographer.

The authors of the blog write, "We, your humble explorers, are devoted to unearthing and documenting the wondrous, the macabre and the obscure from around the globe...We are D and M, a gentleman and a gentle lady who were living normal lives, decided to give it all up, and ride narwhals into the sunset." Further, they have documented the rhinogradentia (as illustrated). I was introduced to the rhinogrades (or "snouters") through Harald Stümpke, Anatomie Et Biologie Des Rhinogrades — Un Nouvel Ordre De Mammifères. Masson, France (1962), which I picked up in Dijon, about five years ago. The text, for readers of French, can be found in its entirety, complete with illustrations, online.

{plate from the book scanned and uploaded
by stevelewalready}

The book is one of my favorites, and I am obsessed with books. Never before or since have I read a work of non-science-fiction (or rather non fiction science fiction, perhaps?) of such brilliance. I honestly cried at the end. Stümpke documents an entire mammalian order whose most remarkable characteristic was the nasorium, an organ derived from the ancestral species's nose, which had variously evolved to fulfill every conceivable function, notably including locomotion. Since the order evolved in isolation on the south Pacific Hi-yi-yi islands, it naturally developed its remarkable variety. All the 14 families and 189 known rhinogradentia descended from a small shrew-like animal. They gradually evolved and diversified to fill most of the ecological niches in the archipelago — from tiny worm-like beings to large herbivores and predators. Images can be found here. Sadly, the entire order, and their home are no more... as the island chain sank into the ocean as a result of an earthquake triggered by the testing of atomic bombs.

{The photo shows the Otopteryx volitans,
the from the folklore section of the Haus der Natur (House of Nature),
a natural history collection in Salzburg, Austria,
uploaded by Curious Expeditions}

{plate from the book scanned and uploaded
by stevelewalready}

I am comforted by the existence of taxidermied rhinogrades in the wunderkammer of Europe.
See also some more recent scholarship here, here and here.