REVEAL: Cabinet of Curiosities

About the Cabinet

At the outset, a cabinet of curiosities beguiles with an amalgam of natural and manmade objects holding personal significance to the artist. From an assortment of rare quartz crystals, whose glyphic surfaces she finds accessible, and an antique astrolabe, a device used to calculate planetary positions, to a lukasa, a memory board handled by Luba shamans in the oral retelling of history, these objects speak to her in hushed whispers, exhorting her to plunge down the proverbial rabbit hole and test unfamiliar paths across time and place. A glass icosahedron, for instance, attracted her for its transparent and reflective properties, fueling a current body of work based on the Platonic solids. More recently, a spherical replica of M.C. Escher’s drawing Angels and Bats stoked her imagination for its tessellations that resemble those in quantum quilts and in the structure of a virus. Each object in her collection presents special insight and quiet joy, and as a group, they form a portrait of the artist’s encyclopedic psyche.
— Sarah Tanguy, Curator