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Object / Art / Specimen is an interdisciplinary exhibition at University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum and draws on the Nicholson, Macleay and University Art collections. The design of this exhibition pays homage to the museum’s original suite of presentations from the 1890s were a combination of artefacts, instruments, art and specimen were displayed in a delightful cacophony to promote knowledge at the museum.
The original cedar specimen cabinets commissioned in 1890 have been re-introduced, albeit in a playful manner, with drawers and windows opened to reveal the interior mechanisms and expand the joinery out into the space. The historic cabinetry is juxtaposed with contemporary steel framed walls that contain the six thematic sections in a series of implied rooms.
In each of the ‘rooms’ six evocative themes from ‘Sex, love, death’, to ‘Chaos, pattern, order’ and ‘Performance, ritual, belief’, explore human experience and methods of understanding the world. Apertures within the steel framed walls visually connects artefacts in the adjacent spaces to establish a narrative across the themes. A lacquered finish to one side of the walls in an evocatively named paint colour called ‘Sky painting’ highlights key artworks in each of the thematic sections.
Photographs by Benjamin Hosking and Hamish McIntosh