Some strange and wonderful artwork has been made in years gone by. Sadly, much of this has since been destroyed, as being ‘too morbid.’
We wipe out the past behind us, like a branch across our footprints in the dust. But it doesn’t change that we were there, or what we learned along our journey. It just makes it more likely we will walk endlessly in circles, until we leave the path behind alone as a marker for the future direction.
Photos are from Morbid Anatomy on Flickr.
Exhibition: The Secret Museum
An exhibition exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world in photographs and artifacts, by Joanna Ebenstein, co-founder of Observatory and creator of Morbid Anatomy.
Photographer and blogger Joanna Ebenstein has traveled the Western world seeking and documenting untouched, hidden, and curious collections, from museum store-rooms to private collections, cabinets of curiosity to dusty natural history museums, obscure medical museums to hidden archives. The exhibition “The Secret Museum” will showcase a collection of photographs from Ebenstein’s explorations–including sites in The Netherlands, Italy, France, Austria, England and the United States–which document these spaces while at the same time investigating the psychology of collecting, the visual language of taxonomies, notions of “The Specimen” and the ordered archive, and the secret life of objects and collections, with an eye towards capturing the poetry, mystery and wonder of these liminal spaces. In tandem with this exhibition, Ebenstein has organized a 2 week “Collector’s Cabinet” at the The Coney Island Museum, which will showcase astounding objects held in private collections, including artifacts featured in her Private Cabinet photo series of 2009.
To download press release, which includes sample images, please click here.
On view from April 10th-June 6th
Observatory
543 Union Street at Nevins, Brooklyn, New York (click here for directions) 3-6 Thursday and Friday 12-6 Saturday and Sunday
Comments
3 responses to “Anatomical Art”
Interesting you didn’t mention the Muter Museum in Philadelphia. Char and I visited it one day, and it was a small collection, but full of the strange and unusual specimens of human biological strangeness. Worth a trip if you are ever in center city Philadelphia.
Muter is on my bucket list. Today’s post was a quick as work and stuff kept me from focusing for long.
Not exactly anatomical art, but, my wife and I stopped into a small museum about the Victorian Era in America. One section focused on death and among the collected items were jewelry made from the hair of the deceased and several photos of family posing with their deceased children.
Fascinating and weird and creepy.
We will have to move the Mutter Museum to the top of the things to do list.
If I can remember the name or the location of the museum we visited I will update the comment.