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| CURIO & DIGITAL SPECIMENS In the eighteenth century, treasure hunters traveled to Pompeii and ripped priceless objects from the site, selling them for a tidy profit to royalty and wealthy collectors. The Delle antichita di Ercolano, itself a luxurious, limited-edition catalog, showcased these objects individually and set against black backgrounds in efforts to rid traces of its original context. The use of fine printing, elegant design, and a limited circulation added an allure of distinction and exclusivity to the artifacts it exhibited. At the same time, objects like these were being cultivated by the European elite and showcased in privately owned curiosity cabinets, a symbol of the era’s newfound faith in science and order. All manner of exotic things came together in these little museums: paintings, medallions, horns, shells, preserved animals, plants. The earliest collections were thought to encourage comparisons. They found analogies and parallels that encouraged a shift to a more culturally dynamic world, leading to a scientific view of reality. Rich and well-traveled patrons imposed hierarchies within these collections, however, providing an illusory sense of control and containment of the world using Linnean language. Categories were social constructions but viewed as naturally determined and intrinsic to the physical world. These collections established a canon, a standard by which all was evaluated, offering a single, authoritative interpretation of the world and all things in it. Sometimes it can be comforting to think there is one answer, but who decides what it is? In an interview, Barbara Kingsolver has said, “Nearly every industrialized country has arrived at its present prosperity by doing awful things, extracting wealth from some unfortunate locale whether in the form of tea or diamonds, cheap labor, or even human slaves. Most of us alive today didn’t participate in those decisions, but we do benefit materially from this history. How do we think about that, if at all? Denial is one path to redemption, but it leaves certain holes, and the possibility of repeat offense.” This body of work addresses the extraction and distance Kingsolver talks about by illustrating historical and contemporary ways we view and treat culture. I am using the decontextualized aesthetic of Delle Antichita di Ercolano as a catalog of discrete objects in order to raise questions about the importance of context. By washing it away and universalizing these objects, it makes appropriation and recontextualization much more comfortable. My Digital Specimens depart slightly from the Curio work by emphasizing cultural, functionally-based objects in an overtly digital format. Pottery pulled from archaeological sites in the South dating thousands of years old are combined with contemporary objects that have a similar function and may seem more familiar to the viewer. As a way of intersecting the historical format with more contemporary means, I am using a scanner rather than a camera to document these artifacts. In certain ways, I am intentionally unable to make choices in lighting and otherwise distinguishing these objects from each other. By aesthetically leveling the playing field, I am refusing to categorize these objects. The digital destructuring and intentional manipulation of the artifacts, however, represents an increasingly contemporary, global view of culture. Since we are constantly inundated with images of culture and other life forms via the television and the Internet, does that make us more connected and more empathetic of others? Or is my computer just a digital curio cabinet, a medium through which I categorize the world that repeats the act of the 18th century collector? |