Curiosities

Richards' installations render the electromagnetic activity all around us visible. Sandaldjian's Microminiatures are carved on dust and hair and viewed with the aid of a microscope.

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Baseball, dust, hair, sewing needle

Catherine Richards' installations poetically circumscribe human relationships with technologies. The microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian (from the Museum of Jurassic Technology) engender a sense of wonder in their absurdity, technical difficulty, and historical equivocation. They are renderings in three dimensions mounted on the heads of needles -- a practice so precise, they were carved between beats of the artist's heart, on human hair. Richards' installation Charged Hearts makes the viewer aware of their own heartbeat (and by implication their mortality, emotions, and vulnerability). As the viewer lifts an anatomical glass model of a human heart, housed in a bell jar, electrons excite causing a luminous blue cloud to glow within the heart of glass. As a dialectic bookend to this piece, Richards' installation Curiosity Cabinet is a copper-plated cabinet in which the viewer may sit. The cabinet protects one from the constant bombardment of radio signals, microwaves, and some other forms of radiation which proliferate in our environment. Just as Charged Hearts delineates our vulnerable position in the universe, Curiosity Cabinet gives us shelter in face of this sublime realization. Together, Richards and Sandaldjian create an environment of awe, wonder and introspection in which the imagination wanders from the microscopic to the infinite. Both artists speak of vulnerability, metaphors of the heart, and containment. In this exhibition the gallery becomes a site of speculation -- through the aid of microscopes Sandaldjians miniature sculptures become visible, as does normally invisible electromagnetic activity in Richards' installations.