Artists invite peek into their curious cabinets
Designed by Mark Lorenzi, this cabinet detail is part of a new Elvehjem Museum of Art exhibition, “Cabinets of Curiosities: Four Artists, Four Visions.” The items remain on display through Sunday, Dec. 3. (Photo: Courtesy of the Elvehjem Museum of Art)
“Cabinets of Curiosities: Four Artists, Four Visions” remains on view in the Elvehjem Museum of Art Mayer Gallery through Sunday, Dec. 3.
The exhibition, with installation pieces by Madison-area artists Martha Glowacki, Mark Lorenzi, Natasha Nicholson and Mary Alice Wimmer, investigates the relationship between historical cabinets, the artist’s work, the artist as collector and life in the studio. The exhibition was organized by Natasha Nicholson.
The artist as collector is part of a great tradition in the history of art, and from the 16th through early 19th centuries, collectors in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, England, France and Italy used special rooms or “cabinets” to house rare and unusual objects of both natural and artificial materials.
The original audiences for cabinets came to see them as their ancestors might have visited a religious shrine: to become believers in the new and the unfamiliar. They came for the secrets that nature and the hand of man revealed in enlightened assemblages. They came to be astonished, and perhaps delighted, as well as educated.
Perhaps millennial expectations have reintroduced the idea of the cabinet as a way of connecting our past and future.
The four artists involved in the Elvehjem installations are all passionate collectors with strong connections to the objects that inform their work. This exhibition, with three contemporary cabinets designed by Glowacki, Lorenzi and Nicholson and a salon-style wall installation by Wimmer, uses historical cabinets and collections as a format to offer viewers insight into the way in which each of the artists interprets similar, as well as diverse, ideas and points of view.
The activities within the studio suggest that this is a place where “alchemy” may still be practiced, where base materials and banal objects can somehow be ennobled, through the artist’s touch and insight, into a higher form.
In this process, artists often collect wonderful and unusual objects, some to be used as parts of their work, others to be contemplated, enjoyed for their aesthetic nourishment and inspiration.
Each artist employs a variety of mediums that may include silverpoint, metal casting and patination, glass blowing and casting, drawing, photography, etching and the use of found objects in assemblages and constructions.
A primary goal of the Elvehjem exhibition is to reintroduce the idea of “magic” in considering works of art. These installations will encourage the viewer to look at the juxtaposition of objects with a new sense of possibility and, in doing so, create a situation where one is invited to adopt wonder as a valid way of contemplating the unfamiliar.