Cabinet of Curiosities
Acrylic and pencil on canvas
24″ x 36″
This painting is on a gallery wrapped canvas with finished edges. It comes ready to hang.
The library classification scheme in use since the late 19th century is the Dewey Decimal system. This system was designed so we could find books on the library shelves easily. The center of the painting shows a card catalog —- pre-computer, pre-internet, pre-ebooks, pre-tagging. There was a very formalized subject heading list catalogers used. Taking this very organized system I placed it in a grid, separating each component into a range of numbers: 000, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, used to separate one subject from another. This formalized system is very geometric to me: concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space.
