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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > October > 06 > Entry
‘Marjorie Moore: Labyrinth’
Austin artist Marjorie Moore has always blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and imagination, the past and the present, the natural world and the supernatural imagination.
Now, in an exhibit at Texas State University-San Marcos, Moore riffs on the long history of scientific and botanical illustration with a series of multimedia drawings.
For centuries artists sought to define, categorize and organize the natural world through meticulous drawings. After all, if humankind could identify everything in the wild, then the wild wouldn’t be so wild - and dangerous. Hence, nature drawing became one of the longest threads in the history of art and the history of science, always entwining the two.
For “Labyrinth,” Moore tapped Texas State University’s entomology collection as a point of origin to create her own version of a wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonder, the 19th-century precursor to today’s modern museum. Wunderkammers were part scientific display and part circus sideshow. And in Moore’s wunderkammer, categories are questioned, and the boundaries between science, popular culture and art are eroded.
Is this today’s natural world we’re looking at in Moore’s work, or is this some imagined future of plant and animal life? Moore combines found vintage scientific and storybook images with her collection of toys and nature specimens to produce a blended narrative of the past and the future of the natural world.
‘Marjorie Moore: Labyrinth’
When: 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays-Friday, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Oct. 22
Where: Gallery II, Mitte Art Building, Sessom and Comanche streets, Texas State University, San Marcos
Free
Image: ‘Pond Collection #15’
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