A new take on past favorites

‘Curiouser’ highlights art of and inspired by the Victorian age

January 04, 2011|Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

PROVIDENCE — On the second floor of the Museum of Natural History, a dramatic argus pheasant mounted in a display case spreads its speckled wings. The museum’s first director, James M. Southwick, owned the bird, and loaned it for exhibition in 1896, the year the museum opened. Then he sold it to Charles Smith, who had a large collection of stuffed birds, mostly native to Rhode Island. Smith ultimately donated that collection to the museum.

Today, many would find a private collection of stuffed birds creepy. But to the Victorians, such collections were de rigueur. As wall text near the pheasant notes, “there was scarcely a middle-class home that did not boast a bell jar full of birds, a terrarium replete with ferns, a shell or mineral cabinet, a butterfly collection, or a seaweed album.’’ That passion for collecting is viewed through the lens of contemporary art in a new exhibit at the museum, “Curiouser: New Encounters With the Victorian Natural History Collection.’’

Curators Erik J. Carlson and Erica Carpenter invited six artists to explore the museum’s vaults, which are filled with preserved insects, birds, shells, rocks, and more — many of which never see the light of the galleries — and to create art installations using some of the specimens.

“It lived up to our expectation of what would be down there, and how strange and weird it would be,’’ said Carlson on the phone from Maryland, where he was spending the holidays. “It’s a time capsule down there.’’

Most of the museum’s holdings date to the Victorian era, according to Carlson. The 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species’’ paired with the rapid expansion of Western interests around the world spurred a fascination with flora and fauna, both exotic and domestic. Schoolchildren and amateur naturalists reveled in taxonomy. As Carlson and Carpenter say in their exhibition essay, to the Victorians, natural history was pop culture.

For a show about a distant time, “Curiouser’’ is deliciously intimate. Maybe the artists related to those long-dead collectors and their fervor for creating something with meaning. At the center is the show’s most visceral and poetic piece, Jennifer Raimondi’s “Comfort.’’ Raimondi scanned a silk moth from the collection, printed out more than 700, cut them out, and draped them over a stuffed fawn. The fawn sits, head cocked alertly, as the soft brown moths appear to alight on its hide, like a fluttering, living cloak. It’s an eerie bit of magic realism.

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