The Wonder of Decay

Art of the Collection: The Photography of Rosamond Purcell from Hans Weise on Vimeo.

An Art That Nature Makes, Molly Bernstein’s new film about the artist Rosamund Purcell, has opened, and closes tomorrow. Clearly this will be a must see once the Film Forum in NYC receives its due.

Ms. Purcell doesn’t count as an influence on my own art, although we work in related veins. I’m a naive artist after all! But, I’m relieved one of the world’s finest photographers never became animated by mirror symmetries! Many of her photographs possess qualities worthy of their being cut and re-coalesced.

Still, as it is with most (of us) artists working with photographic set-ups, Purcell is famously a scavenger and collector.

Wunderkammer

Collectors of our sort do end up with their own cabinet of curiosities.

from the article An Eye For Anomaly,

The rotted book, along with the other objects she has amassed in her studio, reflects her fascination with “things that are transitional — between natural and artificial,” as she puts it, and with decomposition’s way of forming strange and symbolic juxtapositions.

Yes. Same rotted page.

Note her comment during this Q&A about randomness. This would be the subject I would engage her on if I ever had the chance. I couldn’t make out the question about kitsch, also a concerning subject.

She’s not in the collection of the CMA. (Shakes head)

No (!) Wikipedia – her books:

Egg & Nest (Harvard, 2008)
Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things (Quantuck Lane, 2007)
Bookworm (Quantuck Lane, 2006)
Ricky Jay: Dice: Deception, Fate and Rotten Luck (Quantuck Lane, 2002)

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