The 'Fesser took me Thursday night to see Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms at the Tufts University art gallery before the exhibit closed. Here's what I scribbled down: "things that look like things but are not."
In this season of decay and disintegration, of year-end "Best of" lists and other tenuously drawn connections, it was a tonic to examine the ordering and arrangement of disparate objects in the recreation of two rooms--Olaus Worm's seventeenth-century natural history Wunderkammer and Purcell's own studio--that celebrate systematic happy accidents. In art-historian speak, "the assemblage invites viewers to experience and question two systems of classification--the order of science and the objective aesthetic choices of the artist." According to the artist herself, "certain things go together because they look like they go together." I'm with her.
Purcell has worked as a photographer on books by Stephen J. Gould and Ricky Jay, among others. Can't get much cooler than that. Her latest book is Owls Head, "a multi-layered word-portrait of... William Buckminster, proprietor of an extraordinary collection of discarded and decaying items, no-longer-functioning remnants of previous lives."
Movie recommendation: Decasia. "Decasia is no mere celebration of the psychedelic beauty of decay, for Morrison has deliberately chosen images which seem to push back against their own physical disintegration."
Museum recommendation: Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum, 29 January through 12 March 2004
