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The Importance of Objects (The Natural History Museum Collection)
Consider the image of thirty-three million objects in one place: specimens and artifacts caretaken and closely observed by scholars. Vaults and drawers and shelves meticulously house objects that at first glance might seem one in the same... In a world transforming into a gluttony of throwaway consumerism, here are specimens caringly labeled, carefully handled, and investigated with a Sherlock eye...
The sculpture is a table shaped in the footprint of the Museum, displaying a selection from each collection, suggested by the curators of each. Inset video monitors show aspects of the collections, through interviews and visual montages.
Kim Abeles
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Kim Abeles' piece seems a kind of totalizing vision of the Museum: something akin to the drawings Renaissance chorographers made of towns or districts – their rivers, woods, roads, and buildings taken from several angles at once. For us, her work captures the Museum and the things in it as we live and know them.
While anthropologists have customarily focused their studies of objects in the communities where they were created, today they recognize the originating community as an increasingly small part of the total picture. Kim Abeles' piece captures this more current anthropological sense of what these objects are. It also seems a more intuitively correct representation of the Museum than the floorplans we typically provide to our visitors as they wander our exhibit halls.
W. Warner “Bill” Wood, Ph.D.
Curator of Anthropology
Margaret Ann Hardin, Ph.D.
Curator of Anthropology
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