Rachel Berwick
Living Fossil: Latimeria chalumnae (2001)
Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale
If you’re near Kansas City before December 20, this exhibition (at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO) should be worth a visit. Featured artists include Rosamond Purcell, Rachel Berwick, and another of my favorites, Walmor Correa (more about him later). According to the organizers, cryptozoology, perched ambiguously between science and pseudoscience,
is a fascinating zone of inquiry for contemporary artists interested in the fertile margins of the history of science and museums, taxonomy, myth, creativity, and discovery.The theme out of time place scale provides an opportunity to challenge the taxonomic limitations of hierarchy, linearity, chronology, and/or context that museums and art history manipulate to control presentation and reception. Staking out a position, or non-site, that blurs the boundaries between time place scale and choosing not to deconstruct predominant museum ideologies, this project constructs an alternative mode of address that favors a return to the organized mayhem, wonder, delight, and spiritual and intellectual adventurism of pre-Enlightenment curio cabinets.
Whew! That’s quite a mouthful. I mean, an eyeful.