Exhibition | Reverie&Alchemy

The Cabinet of Curiosity was born of the existential desire to understand and control the world, to conspicuously display status and learnedness, and to create the story of self and community. They were the antecedent for both the modern museum and botanical gardens, but also for the circus and the midway, a wild mixture of naturalia, artificialia, exotica, and scientifica. The history of the Cabinet is long and often problematic, but it is also surprisingly post-modernist in its dependence on individual interpretation, its complex and contradictory levels of meaning, its joyful mixing of genre, and its disregard for any notion of universal “truth.” Each object in a Cabinet nods towards epic adventure, and taken as a whole, tells a symbolic story that presents the viewer with essential questions about the transience of human life and our place in the world. The artists and collections in this exhibition together tell a wondrously complicated and contradictory tale about this particular place and its inhabitants, both current and in the past. Who are we, who were we, and who do we want to be?