January
30,
2004
The
Collector: MHC Art Museum Hosts Rosamond Purcell Exhibition
| 
Photo: Todd LeMieux
Students Kirstin Gadiel '05
(left), Elizabeth Griffin '04 (second from right),
and Emily Mack '04 (right) help artist Rosamond Purcell
(second from left) with the installation of Two Rooms. |
The bear came from a movie prop house in Burbank," said
Dennis Purcell, pointing to a mangy-looking white bear suspended
from the ceiling of a small room in the Mount Holyoke College
Art Museum. During January, Purcell assisted his wife—artist,
photographer, and writer Rosamond Purcell—with the installation
of Two Rooms, an exhibition in which she pairs an exact-scale
replica of a seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet or Wunderkammer (an
early precursor of modern museums) with a reproduction of her
own studio and collection of "curiosities."
The bear is only one of numerous natural and manmade objects arranged neatly
on walls and shelves in Purcell's replica of Danish physician and naturalist
Olaus Worm's collection. Purcell, known for her arresting color photographs
of the strange, even macabre objects found in natural history museums, has long
been fascinated with a 1655 engraving of Worm's museum. After seeing a
wall-sized
reproduction of the engraving at
the natural history museum in Copenhagen in the 1980s, she embarked on the ambitious
project of re-creating the room.
Finding matches for the countless objects seen in the engraving required persistence
and creativity. Purcell purchased some items; others are on loan from museums;
still others had to be made from scratch. The armadillo and ostrich eggs, for
example, are real, but the lemur was fabricated, as was a spotted coat that Dennis
Purcell made by stapling fur skins onto his old college fencing jacket. One object
that sits on a back shelf in the engraving remains a complete mystery. "No
one knows what this curly thing is," he said. "So I made one out
of wood and painted it silver."
In Two Rooms Purcell also presents a reconstruction
of her studio in Somerville, Massachusetts, where for many years
she's arranged the couple thousand
or so rusted, bent, chewed, twisted, oxidized, and worm-eaten objects that she's
culled over the course of two decades from an 11-acre junkyard in Owls
Head,
Maine. Her juxtaposition of the two rooms prompts reflection on the human urge
to collect and classify, on utility and uselessness, on mortality and ceaseless
change. Worm, as the exhibition catalogue notes, collected objects in order to
identify, classify, and preserve them for scientific study. By contrast, Purcell's
collection celebrates dissolution and enigma—"the outer limits of
familiarity," as she writes in Owls Head, her recently published book about
the Maine junkyard and William Buckminster, its longtime, not-always-eager -to-sell
owner.
|
Rosamond Purcell, Olaus
Worm's Cabinet of Curiosities (1655), 2003 |
Installing such an unusual exhibition kept the
museum staff and its student interns busy during January. Countless
boxes and crates containing objects ranging in size and fragility
from cicada shells to porcelain figurines to large plates of
rusted metal had to be carefully unpacked. That work fell primarily
to interns Emily Mack '04, Elizabeth Griffin '04, Kirstin Gadiel '05,
and Elizabeth Pagos '05. "Seeing the boxes lined up was daunting," Mack
said. "With all the tiny components and pieces it was amazing." Griffin
added, "Because of the number of pieces, we got more of a hands-on experience
with installation than we would with a more traditional exhibition."
On one afternoon during installation, the students
placed an assortment of corroded metal fragments—a rusted lock, buckles, half a faucet—on a work table
covered with brown craft paper. These were destined for a glass case titled "Recent
Archaeology from Maine." Purcell picked up a piece of twisted wire, noting
its resemblance to a question mark. "Objects like this," she said, "remind
me of parts of a sentence, and once they're lined up look like the
shapes of letters."
Elsewhere in the gallery, a 12-foot-high temporary wall was in the process
of being covered with plates of scrap metal; a heap of turquoise-colored
toilet bowl floats filled an old bin; and a jumble of rusty household gadgets—ladles,
eggbeaters, and the like—sprang upward from an ancient-looking trunk, as
if clamoring to tell their stories. They recall a touching passage in Owls
Head in which Purcell imagines the dead rising from the grave and coming back for
their discarded things: " 'That's my puck . . .' 'and
raincoat . . .' 'I've come for the goal post.' "
Two Rooms is a fascinating primer on impermanence. Books that were once the
newly published apples of their authors' eyes have been ravaged by termites or
turned into stones, their pages fused and unreadable. No doubt someone made fabulous
meringues with those rusty eggbeaters—but where is the pie maker now? "I
have chipped these things from the matrix of the almighty thingness of our all-American
world," Purcell wrote in Owls Head, "and, as I did not stop to
mourn their demise, why not revel now in the stages of their inevitable disintegration?"
The exhibition includes a selection of Purcell's collages
and box constructions as well as many of her photographs. Organized
by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and curated by Lisa Melandri,
Two Rooms continues through March 14. Short presentations and
a panel discussion with Purcell, writer Sven Birkerts, and curator
Wendy Watson will take place on Thursday, February 5, at 4:30
pm in the Art Building's
Gamble Auditorium; a reception will follow. For more information, visit the
museum's
Web site here.
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