SOUTH HADLEY, MA.- The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum will preset "Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms," from 29 January-12 March 2004. A deep-seated curiosity and profound sense of wonder link contemporary Boston artist Rosamond Purcell and 17th-century Danish physician and naturalist Olaus Worm. Although Worm died in 1655, he maintains an important place in history because of his remarkable book, Worm’s Museum, or History of Very Rare Things, Natural and Artificial, Domestic and Exotic, Which are Stored in the Author’s House in Copenhagen, published by his son in the year of his death. A spectacular engraving in that volume provides a view of Worm’s collection with its both rigorous and helter-skelter juxtaposition of naturalia (stones, shells, marine specimens, samples of earth) and artificialia (ethnic clothing, weapons, ancient Roman and contemporary North Atlantic artifacts). He amassed this "cabinet of curiosities" in an attempt to catalogue and explain his world. Using a scientific approach, he tested boundaries between myth and fact.
The engraving that documents Worm’s museum took hold of Rosamond Purcell’s psyche early in her career as a photographer and masterful collagist. "Purcell has long been a digger, an arranger, and a collector," writes Lisa Melandri in the show’s catalogue. "These impulses to alternately unearth, mask, and display have formed the basis of her rich and complex artistic oeuvre. From well-known exquisite photographs to an unruly, breathtaking studio, she has been most interested in pointing out where meaning is layered and ambiguous-and where objects avoid definition. In prints, constructions, and large-scale installations, Purcell features things that have come out from under wraps-from museum storage, from beneath decrepit floors at the junkyard, from a forgotten collection." Unlike Worm’s room, though, Purcell’s accumulation is organized according to the artist’s internal aesthetic logic.
In Two Rooms Purcell brings her own personal microcosm face to face with its own historical model. Recreating Worm’s museum in a nine- by twelve-foot room, she both explores this historical model and its taxonomic basis. Her own "room"-a free recreation of her jam-packed Somerville, Massachusetts, studio-contains things found, recombined, and created from her excavations in a modern world. Since the 1980s, Purcell has been mining a junkyard in Owl’s Head, Maine, owned by William Buckminster, which is filled with, as she terms it "things that look like things but are not." Scrap metal, decaying objects of all kinds, petrified books, fragments of rubber, marble, and glass have been removed from Buckminster’s junkyard and recontextualized in the artist’s own cabinet of curiosities.
Melandri notes, "Culled from an inventory of over 2,000 objects, Purcell’s room features pieces that…have become unique through exposure to the elements. Metal has taken on an extraordinary patina of vibrant color….Books dug out of the junk pile-some with semi-visible titles, some petrified, bent, or stuck together-exist in a realm between nature and culture and mark another important parallel with 17th-century cabinets. Purcell herself has taken on the role of the scientist in the field, discovering, excavating, capturing, and isolating each piece before bringing these specimens into the catalogued world of her studio." This exhibition has been organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and curator, Lisa Melandri.
