Yearning for Wonder
A wildly popular exhibit in Washington DC explores the glories of mundane things. Kris Culp blogs about the exhibition and the yearning for wonder in this cultural moment for the Enhancing Life Project blog. She is one of 35 scholars in the 26-month-long project funded by the John Templeton Foundation and based at the University of Chicago and Ruhr Universitat Bochum, and directed by professors William Schweiker and Guenther Thomas. See the recent University of Chicago press release about the Project.
"The walls, washed in deep carmine and patterned with fanciful designs, drew me into the room. In the middle, something waved like a flag over an old octagonal wooden cabinet with its drawers akimbo. Approaching it, I saw that the flag was a wasps’ nest still attached to a branch. Odd bits of nature, mostly rather large and exotic insects, were arranged in the drawers. I glanced around. With a start, I realized that scores of them were marching and winging their ways up the walls, as if they had fled the cabinet. Each perfect specimen was pinned in perfect place—iridescent, striped, lunar green, leafy green, black lace winged, horned, polished—insect glitterati.
"Jennifer Angus’s work, In the midnight garden, plays on both early modern cabinets of curiosities (Wunderkammern, precursors to natural history museums) and the twentieth-century boxes of artist Joseph Cornell, placing the viewer inside them, as it were. Viewers are asked to surrender to the strange glories of the insect world, a world that is filled with astonishing, disturbing, and enchanting things...."
Read more here.