Past Exhibitions

Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms

29 January–14 March 2004

Rosamond Purcell (American, b. 1942) Studio (detail), 1991-2003 Mixed media

The culmination of the artist's twenty-year preoccupation with notions of collecting, assemblage, and decay. This exhibition recreates on site and in exact scale naturalist Olaus Worm's 17th-century cabinet of curiosities adjacent to Rosamond Purcell's own studio, a modern-day collection of "things that are but are not." Separated by time but joined by sensibility, determination and vision, these two rooms provide a scintillating journey for those who travel through them. Organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and curator Lisa Melandri, the show is free and open to the public.

Cabinets of curiosity—or Wunderkammern—were the precursors of modern museums. They emerged in the 16th century when the basis of human knowledge and understanding began to shift from simple belief to scientific proof. In an attempt to create a microcosm of the universe as they knew it, scientists and others collected examples of the exceptional, the rare, and the marvelous. They displayed these natural and constructed objects in fascinating combinations and unusual juxtapositions, often obscuring the boundaries between nature and art, but always painstakingly classifying them to promote study and knowledge. The popularity of Wunderkammern proliferated throughout the Renaissance and beyond. Indeed, Francis Bacon proclaimed that no learned person should be without one.

An extraordinary engraving printed in 1655 that intricately documents the museum of Danish physician and naturalist Olaus Worm took hold of artist Rosamond Purcell's psyche early in her career as a photographer and masterful collagist. She was fascinated by Worm's collection that included both naturalia (stones, shells, marine specimens, samples of earth) and artificialia (clothing, weapons, ancient Roman and contemporary artifacts). On a trip to Copenhagen in the 1980s, she came face to face with a wall-sized reproduction of the engraving. Nearby, she says, "in three-dimensional glory, sat one of the only known survivors from his collection: a horse jaw grown round by the branch of tree….I circled this curiosity with the camera-something one cannot do with a drawing made from one perspective." Since then, she adds, "I have spent hours gazing at everything in the engraving-from the fierce fish to the giant turtle shells to the human figure-staring as if I were actually there in an ordinary room full of mysterious and familiar things I might even touch." To indulge her obsession with Worm's museum, Purcell had to see it built and began her quest of matching objects to the print.

In the meantime, she cameacross an eleven-acre junkyard in Owls Head, Maine, covered by "two centuries worth of weathered, formerly useful objects." As a natural digger, arranger and collector, Purcell began excavating this site for-as she puts it—"the fact-free, provenance-lacking, bucket-kicking, burnt-out, no-good, nameless shard that, in passing, just happens to look like something else." Organizing these treasures in her own Somerville, Massachusetts, studio according to her internal aesthetic knowledge, she has created a unique cabinet of curiosities.

In Two Rooms, Rosamond Purcell's personal microcosm comes face to face with its historical model in a large-scale presentation that invites viewers to explore and experience two systems of classification. In a nine-by-twelve-foot room, she has borrowed or replicated many of the fascinating curiosities depicted in the engraving of Worm's Wunderkammer. In contrast, the second room-Purcell's deconstructed/reconstructed studio-contains a panoply of discoveries mined from the Owls Head junkyard. This amassed collection of scrap metal, glass, farming equipment, industrial machinery, and a library of petrified books forms an alternative universe from which objects have been reconstituted, recategorized and recontextualized.

A distillation of Purcell's lifelong passions, Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms explores the intricate intersections between art and science, collecting, museology, and the vibrancy of decay. In contrasting Worm's scientific naivety with Purcell's awareness that change is the only constant, the exhibition reveals abiding enigmas at the heart of the search for truth. In the process of comparing the two, viewers have a chance to assess the way meaning is constructed and to delight in realizing how changeable it can be.

Self-taught photographer and artist Rosamond Purcell is the author of many books, including Owls Head (Quantuck Lane Press, 2003) and Dice: Deception, Fate and Rotten Luck (W.W. Norton, 2002) coauthored with Ricky Jay. She has also collaborated on several books with noted biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

An illustrated catalogue with essays-the first scholarly treatment of Purcell's work-accompanies Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms. In addition, a corollary exhibition entitled Rosamond Purcell: Photographs, organized by the Tufts University Gallery and Professor Andrew McClellan, will be on view.

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