“Doctor Kali Gehry’s Cabinet of (in)Curiosities & Ecstatic Nonsense”, interactive installation, 2020
Located in a small town mall, this hucksters stand is selling nothing save an idea: that the voracious acquisitiveness that’s promoted through the capitalist project’s trajectory of making life better via purchasing is inevitably fruitless, if not bankrupt. Further, if we make an effort to consider more subtle resonances in our lives, it is within the cracks, within the refuse, within the rejects, within the moment-to-moments of unease that we might find a glimpse of meaning, a momentary respite from the (Absurd) foreknowledge of our insignificant mortality.
The project is a Neo-Neo Dada Kunstkammer taken for a walk towards illogical outcomes. The project sits somewhat uneasily between a dream theatre, an ark, a carny, a pirate booty, a gallery, a museum, an atrocity exhibition, a playground and a personal portfolio. Due to its recording of the specifics of locality, the project can also be viewed as a mixed media portrait: of me, of my ancestral proclivities, and of a larger community’s place and time. Like the classic Cabinets of Curiosities, this is a work of cultural propaganda. This cabinet is a bewildering, heterogeneous array of insignificant things, an extended work investigating some ever-present relationships between my art making, film practice and exhibiting expertise.
If, cumulatively, the historical curiosity cabinet was a colonialist map of the exotic, mysterious and conveniently not-known, one of the intentions of this cabinet is to throw a monkey wrench into such convenient considerations, stimulating ripping yarns (as in “thrilling stories”) of possibility riffed from largely indiscernible yet decidedly modest sources. This cabinet’s various things’ significance arises not from their inherent exotic ness, but rather from their inconvenient selection, their assemblage, their arrangement in the cabinet, their mise-en-scene and their mise-en-place. The cabinets are important by virtue of being on display in this cabinet at this particular time in this particular place.