Curio Cabinet

For some, Australia Day on January 24th is a time for silly beachside activities; for the Eora Indigenous people, it can be a time for deep reflection. Each Australia Day morning, the Eora group WugulOra holds a morning ceremony as a sort of counterbalance to the wild partying of the day. The above image shows an Eora boy dressed in traditional makeup and garb. The smoke surrounding him is part of the 11:45 a.m. event, in which fire ceremonies around the Sydney Harbor begin and 500 people contribute leaves from around the world in a cleansing ritual. For many of Australia's Indigenous people, a day to celebrate national pride is also a day to remember historical struggles against racialized violence; for example, as late as the 1970s, aboriginal children were removed from their families in a policy of Assimilation into "white cultures." The Indigenous ceremony, which ends with the raising of both the Australian and the black, red, and gold Aboriginal flag, is just one way for the Indigenous peoples of the continent to remind others that their histories are just as important and sacred as the rest of Australia's past.

 

Below: more images from the WugulOra Morning Ceremony on Australia Day.
 

Image credit & copyright: Reuters / Mick Tsikas, SIBW
 

Title: The Trial
Artist: Sidney Nolan (1917-1992)
Created: 1947
Medium: enamel paint on composition board
Dimensions: 35.7 x 47.7 in (90.7 x 121.2 cm)
Current location: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia
 

The odds don't appear to be in Ned Kelly's favor here. The Australian outlaw and bushranger (family of ex-British convicts living in the wilds) found himself on trial for bank robberies, resisting arrest, murdering law officers, and a host of minor charges. In artist Sidney Nolan's depiction of the outlaw and folk-hero, Kelly dons a "black box," which resembles Kelly's own bulletproof iron armor and casts a dark, anonymous shadow over the central figure. The policeman sitting beneath the judge holds the verdict in his hands, in what would seem like a fateful ending to the outlaw life Kelly was born into and unable to resist, change, or escape. The Trial is one of 27 paintings Nolan created in a series based on Kelly's life that incorporates avant-garde techniques of unorthodox symbolism, as well as perspectives juxtaposed against Australia's violent histories. By the end of the series, Ned Kelly is the stuff of Robin Hood and Joaquin Murietta-outlaw folklore. As for Nolan, the premiere of his series at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the '90s solidified his place as one of Australia's greatest painters of the 20th century.

 

Below: more from Nolan's Ned Kelly series, including First-class marksman, and Kelly and Red Horse.
 

Image credit & copyright: National Gallery of Australia, Tate Modern Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales
 

No one lives forever—that is unless that person is Susan Potter, a digital cadaver donor and subject of a recent feature for National Geographic. Potter was a German-born woman living in Denver who pursued Dr. Vic Spitzer in 2000 to become one of a select few digital cadavers to be scanned for medical research—similar to the Visible Human Project. She is seen here in one of her favorite roles, mentoring students at the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus. There, she often gave speeches on the importance of kindness from doctors. Dr. Spitzer was initially hesitant to perform the grueling task of scanning her cadaver: the Visible Human Project already had its healthy male and female volunteers. Yet as Potter and Spitzer's relationship grew over 15 years, the latter realized that a body with illnesses had more benefits than drawbacks as it could offer medical students insights into treatments. Two years after her death, Potter became 27,000 cross-sectioned photos digitally compiled into Touch of Life Technologies anatomy education tools. Potter seems to be where she always wanted to be: helping medical students achieve their educational goals.
 

Below: Spitzer views Potter's corpse (she passed away from pneumonia in 2015) prior to preparations for freezing; the result shows a recreation of Potter's visage as part of a digital cadaver program.
 

Image credit & copyright: Lynn Johnson, National Geographic
 

Title: Untitled
Artist: Ruth Asawa (1926-2013)
Created: 1962
Medium: copper, brass wire
Dimensions: 94 x 17.25 x 17.25 in (238.8 × 44.5 × 44.5 cm)
Current location: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California
 

20th-century American art doesn't just belong to the Norman Rockwells or Jackson Pollocks. Ruth Asawa's sinewy metallic sculptures tell of a long, adverse life studying art throughout the continent. In 1942, when Asawa was a teenager, her father was arrested by the FBI and his family taken to Japanese internment camps in New Mexico and Arkansas. While interned, Asawa was able to take drawing lessons from Walt Disney studio animators who had also been removed from their homes; she later attended schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Mexico City, Mexico, before finally landing at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. The latter experimental school proved to be a hotbed for modernist studies with instructors like Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers. Asawa drew from these varied sources, fusing the modernists' use of abstraction and geometric shapes with Mexican weaving techniques and Japanese uses of space and movement. The result, like the above Untitled sculpture, are both wholly Asawa and wholly 20th-century American.

 

Image credit & copyright: Laurence Cuneo, Estate of Ruth Asawa
 

Everybody knows the Mona Lisa stares at you. Except she doesn't! Since the 1960s, perceptual psychologists, have described the Mona Lisa effect as the phenomenon of feeling like the subject of a painting or photograph is watching you as you walk around the artwork. It occurs when subjects look straight ahead from the image at an angle of between zero and five degrees. However, it isn't possible to measure the exact gaze-direction of a painted subject. So researchers from Bielefeld University in Germany recently set out to estimate Mona Lisa's eye angle. They surveyed dozens of subjects as they sat in front of a high-fidelity digital image of the painting, zoomed in at different magnitudes, and with the subjects sitting at varying distances from the screen. They asked the subjects to point on a folding measuring stick to the exact point where they thought Mona Lisa was looking. After 2,000 measurements, they determined that Mona LIsa is gazing from about 35 cm inside "pictorial space" to a point that is 14.4 degrees to the viewer's right side in "real space." That's way outside the five degree angle where the Mona Lisa effect is real. In other words, Mona Lisa doesn't actually create the Mona Lisa effect. D'oh! But don't despair, da Vinci fans: Leonardo's masterpiece still exhibits the equally enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. That's the illusion that she stops smiling when you look directly at her mouth. Researchers say Leonardo's techniques could be useful for designing robots and 3D avatars that can engage more normally with humans. Grazie mille Mr. Roboto!

Title: Study for Mural of Rock Breakers
Artist: Henrietta Shore (b. 1880-1963)
Created: ca. 1937
Medium: tempera
Dimensions: 48 x 102 in (121.9 x 259 cm)
Current location: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
 

These guys really have their work cut out for them. Muralist Henrietta Shore created them after receiving a commission from the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) in 1935 to paint several lunettes for California's Santa Cruz Post Office. Stone was mostly known for her "semi-abstract" and non-figurative works at the time; it was likely the current New Deal programs that encouraged Shore to highlight the noble bodies of the working class in her murals. Some of them feature artichoke farmers and fishermen; in the above Rock Breakers, miners are depicted working among violet-shaded hues at the Limestone Quarries Industry. Though the murals remain the pride of the Santa Cruz Post Office, Stone only received $230 for all four, adding to her financial woes when commissions dried up during the Great Depression. Maybe the anniversary of her 139th birthday would be a good time to start remembering one of Northern California's most expressive artists of the early 20th century.
 

Below: the Santa Cruz Post Office images include: the finalized Limestone Quarries Industry, Artichoke Industry, and Fishing Industry.
 

Image credit & copyright: Mobile Ranger, Smithsonian American Art Institute
 

She may look quaint in this portrait of a secretary, but Norma McCorvey's life was anything but tranquil. In 1969, she became the central figure to decades of political firestorms as the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade. The abortion legality case was filed when McCorvey became pregnant for the third time and was referred to lawyers (backed by doctors) who wanted to challenge Texas state's restrictions on the procedure. Prior to Roe, McCorvey lived a hard life, suffering sexual abuse and homelessness; when she revealed her identity shortly after the January 22, 1973, 7-2 Roe decision, she noted her unemployed status and depression. As political machinations polarized voters against the Supreme Court decision, McCorvey became a face for the pro-choice movement, eventually working for a clinic and publishing a memoir—which caught the attention of an evangelical minister at a signing. In 1994, McCovey became a born-again Christian, devoting herself to anti-abortion causes and subsequently ending her own same-sex relationship in the process. She even got back on the legal docket in the 2005 case McCorvey v. Hill, which made an unsuccessful attempt to overturn Roe. When she passed away in 2017, McCorvey left behind a legal legacy as vexing as it is controversial.
 

Image credit & copyright: Bettman Archive / Getty Images
 

Who needs to paint the roses red when these psychedelic flowers exist? Belaurian photographer Slava Semeniuta (known as Local Preacher online) is a self-professed lover of neon, and in his latest series Granular Creatures, he quite literally sheds new light on blooming subjects. To capture these otherworldly subjects, Semeniuta placed them under ultraviolet light and used a macro lens to get extreme close-ups. The results in the above photo show a rainbow of light colors refracted off of what looks like a stamen, or a flower's central pollen-producing organ. While we may marvel at the luminescence, ultraviolet-radiant flora have evolutionary benefits: bees can see ultraviolet, blue, and green light, making pollination a much easier job when their food gives off good lighting. Seems food presentation isn't just a thing emphasized at fancy restaurants!
 

Below: more of Semeniuta's striking macro images.
 

Image credit & copyright: Slava Semeniuta
 

Title: Untitled
Artist: Alice Hope (b. 1966)
Created: ca. 2016-2018
Medium: can tabs, tubing
Dimensions: 6 ft diameter (1.82 m diameter)
 

For some of us, the 84th anniversary of canned beer this week is an opportunity to pop open a cold one and make "hold my beer" jokes. For artist Alice Hope, it's a chance to take tabs on her creative process. This untitled piece features wheels made from can tabs, and is just one example of Hope's ability to transform small objects into grand sculptures with surprising textures. Hope got the idea when she happened upon approximately 700 pounds of can tabs in a recycling bin—likely just waiting there for a heavy metal artist such as herself to make the most of the materials. When she isn't connecting aluminum can tabs into reflective metal tubing, Hope works with steel and ferrite magnets to create hair-raising canvases. She has even programmed code into moving machinery installations. Industry, waste, and renewal are all themes of her recycled art, though the can tabs are specifically "[emblematic] of consumption, desire, and the urban myth." And here we thought it was just hops, grains, yeast, and water swirling around in those cans.
 

Below: a closer view of the aluminum can tab texture from Alice Hope's art.
 

Image credit & copyright: Alice Hope
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this fowl favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Compensating for something? This comically large gun is not a prop, but an actual functioning weapon used in the 19th and early 20th centuries for waterfowl hunting, a popular January pastime. Though, these two are using it wrong. In practice, the 90-pound punt gun would be propped up on the bow of a one-man punt boat, with a single hunter behind the trigger. The poor ducks never stood a chance: the gun's one-pound shots could kill several dozen birds at once. Fortunately, by the time this image was snapped in 1923, the big guns and commercial waterfowl hunting had been banned in the U.S. for several years. Let's hope these two guys didn't do anything too bird-brained for the photo-op… like accidentally load the weapon.
 
Below: a hunter in laying low with his punt gun in his punt boat.
 

Title: cover for The True Mother Goose

Artist: Blanche McManus Mansfield (1869-1935)
Created: 1895
Medium: color process lithograph on paper
Dimensions: 20.6 x 14.4 in. (52.5 x 36.5 cm)
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this fowl favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Judging a book by its cover isn't such a bad idea in this case. Author and illustrator Blanche McManus' cover for The True Mother Goose whimsically reflects the magical and exciting tales that lie within the pages. Born on February 2, 1870, McManus studied art in Europe before opening her studio in Chicago in 1893. In her workspace, she used lithography to craft covers for many classic pieces of literature, including works by Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Lewis Carroll. In creating the look of the black-and-white geese and red text of Mother Goose, McManus would have used an involved lithographic process. She would first draw on limestone with a grease-based medium, then moisten the stone so the blank spaces absorbed the water. Oil-based ink would then be applied to the stone and picked up by the greasy drawing, while the water-soaked parts would repel it. Finally, a piece of paper would be pressed onto the stone, transferring the inked drawing to the page. While the process may seem laborious, McManus' results are simple yet elegant. What's good for the Mother Goose is worth a second gander!

 

Below: a few more examples of McManus' cover stories.