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Caribou Head
Art Studio

Wave form
carved from a Plexiglas block for a machine to test wave formations for the Navy Engineering Machine Shop


In the curiosity cabinet, objects related to each other in ways different from those we expect today. We begin our version of the curiosity cabinet the with three pairs of objects, meant to introduce the modern viewer to new ways of seeing relationships among the heterogeneous objects of this collection.

The first of these pairs introduce the visitor not only to the essential sixteenth-century terms 'naturalia' and 'artificialia,' those things created by nature and those by human hands, but also to the ways in which these categories become blurred. The caribou head, which was a part of nature, is transformed into an artifact, and the Plexiglas wave form, used by the Navy to test wave formations, is a purely artificial substance modeled on a natural phenomenon. The wave form, not coincidentally, is the UCSB logo.

[back]--o--[fore]

{Gallery}
{Microcosm}