“The Beautiful Is Always Bizarre”
-Charles Baudelaire

“…our future tends to be prehistoric.”
-Robert Smithson

SRO GALLERY is pleased to present “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a group exhibit of 8 artists whose work relates through the visible and invisible associations conjured in a Wunderkammer.

Exotic, strange and curiously formed.

The work of the Cabinet of Curiosities is a ceremonious presentation of paintings and objects inspired by the Wunderkammer of 16th century Europe.  These collections incorporated the cataloging of nature, religious relics, art and antiquities.  They detailed a microcosm of civilization, the predecessor to the museum.

Curious attachments arise within a Wunderkammer; imagery develops forming an intangible continuity.

In the Cabinet, the gallery space becomes a theater in which we find the representations of the natural world augmented by opulent artifice, the beauty of distortion bordering on the gruesome.

In the “Cabinet of Curiosities” no intention is made to explain the connections between the artists, the art, or to create a narrative.  It is likened to an encyclopedia with the pages shredded and reassembled, offering up new connections and freedoms of associations; selves we inhabit in thought without looking back to the exit door.  

As this in only a Single Room – what could go wrong?

Artists in the Cabinet:

Matt Austin                            Jesse McCloskey
Don Doe                                 John Mitchell
Laura Greengold                 Heather Morgan
Everest Hall                           Rosie West

catalog available