Natural Selection

San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery

May 19 - June 26, 1999

These artists have at least two things in common: they all collect and they all have a deep fascination with the mysteries of nature. Their work may be seen as a scientific specimens, oddities, and personal observations. Many of the artists approach art from a science background, emphasizing the similarities between scientific investigation and artistic experimentation. They use their studios like a creative laboratory, where they dissect and reassemble objects and ideas that document their daily activities and interaction with nature. The artists have contained, wrapped, and preserved plants and animals; like fossils, the work in this exhibition is a record of life caught in a fragile state of disintegration. This suggested sequence, with younger strata overlying older strata, records the time spent in the studio and reflects on the cycles inherent in nature, and on how nature reclaims materials through decay and deterioration.

For centuries people have collected the strange and the exotic, inspected and speculated on the meaning of the inexplicable elements around us. The German curiosity cabinet, Wunderkammer, housed wonders ranging from mummified mermaids to shrunken heads, as well as fossils and other elements of natural history, but its first emphasis was on the strange and unnatural, and fakes were abundant. The bestiary descended from the Physiologus, a book known to be in existence in the fifth century organizing the elements of natural science. The bestiary exemplifies ideas found in this book of nature, for example, the conception of the world as either the product of text (the divine word) or reducible to text (quantitative and qualitative science). To a great extent, the mysteries in nature have been preempted by our modern science that endeavors to categorize, explain, and control every nuance of our world.

Even this knowledge of scientific facts cannot reduce the sense of awe most of us experience when we are confronted with raw nature; it is an instinctive reaction to something greater than ourselves. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us." In her artist statement, Susan Magnus writes of the "strange mixture of horror and delight" she experienced as a child while viewing the collection of pickled monsters and other exotic animals at the Vanderbilt Museum. Most of us still have this sense of morbid curiosity and twisted humor, like Steinbeck's Cannery Row tales of Mack and the Boys going on the great frog hunt to get specimens for Doc's lab. There is no logical explanation for why certain elements in this exhibition are at once humorous and full of sorrow, beautiful and repulsive; it is simply a gut reaction we have. We recognize our lack of control over our world in spite of the advances in modern science. So, go and see the otters in Monterey Bay before they're gone; enjoy what you can while it's there, because change is inevitable.

Cheryl Coon , Curator