It Was and Remains

Featuring: Elizabeth Ribera and Megan Diddie
Exhibition dates: May 3rd – May 24th 2009
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 9th, 12pm – 3pm

“Oh, it was, and remains a source of great and terrible wonder.”
- Humbert Humbert

Elizabeth Ribera and Megan Diddie investigate ruins, by-products, and vestiges in an effort to understand our relationship with the past. Using art as a creative lens, employ mixed media, photography, and works on paper, to make sense of our skeletons reconcile our organic fate.

Elizabeth Ribera revives the intersection of art and science in the tradition of the Wunderkammer -- an encyclopedic collection of objects whose categorical boundaries can variously be defined, as natural history, geology, archeology, ethnography, historical relics and works of art according to the whims of the collector. By re-contextualizing traditional photography, found objects, biological material and mixed media into a cabinet of curiosities, Ribera challenges traditional taxonomy by collecting and organizing relics and specimens according to her individual will and personal interest.

Ribera’s collection demonstrates how humans, as voyeurs, deliberately manipulate found-evidence in an effort to resolve the natural world with human subjectivity. It is her hope, that by ‘knowing how to see’ our natural world perhaps we will be inspired to preserve what we have left, and she don’t mean in formaldehyde!

Megan Diddie’s work presents a psychological excavation of a land buried among the sticky lobes of the mind. A tension mounts between the land, its inhabitants, its tumors, artificial limbs, industrial outgrowths, progeny and predecessors, until eventually the world consumes itself with a chaotic tremor and vanishes beneath the fault lines to fester and reform.

E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion and notions of solipsism inform Diddie’s most recent work. She explains "Thinking about this idea has made me more aware about where my ideas come from and how they are shaped. My own expectations, arising from imagination, knowledge, and personal experience, are not expectations in the sense of hopes I have for the future but rather expectations created in the past and informing the present which have an indefinite impression on the way I perceive things. The work in this show is born of ideas which arose when expectation created an illusion, a discursive thought, or an intense impression that went on to inspire a visual idea or aided in the process of making."