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Artifacts and Anomalies: Cabinets of Wonder and the Play of Technology
Exhibition by Elona Van Gent (the USA)
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Elona Van Gent was born 1961, in Winnegabo,
Nebraska. Professor Van Gent has been a member of the teaching faculty in the
Department of Art and Design at Grand Valley State University in Allendale,
Michigan, since 1993.
Ten person exhibitions
of professor Van Gent were hold in exhibition halls in the USA in 1990 - 2002.
The exhibitions were paid attention by audience, first of all the university and
artistic.
Artist Elona Van Gent draws
inspiration for her artwork in part from natural history and the cabinets of
curiosities of early modern Europe. What interests her most about them is their
combination of the natural and unnatural, the chaotic organization of their
parts in a world where reality and symbolism, science and art were inextricably
intertwined. Object of all kinds can be revisited in this "theatre of the world"
- inspired by Pliny's races, Aldrovandi's dragons, Seba's seven headed-hydras
and other sea monsters, plus medical and musical instruments, toys, and other
technologies, images, proverbs, and stories that extended from the Classical to
the Contemporary. The art that she creates with the help pf computer processing
and while inspired by those magical, bizarre, odd, contradictory, startling
creatures constitutes her own Cabinet of Wonders.
The exhibition was hold in the room where the items of
anatomy and teratology of the Petersburg Kunstkamera of the XVII-XIX centuries
have been exposed. In the opinion of professor Van Gent, the chambers of the
Petersburg Kunstkamera embodying the spirit of natural history are the organic
environment for exposition of her specific work of art. |
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