robert amesbury under glass - carrollandsons.net · robert amesbury under glass october 21 Ð ......
TRANSCRIPT
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Robert Amesbury Under Glass October 21 – November 28, 2009 Opening reception Friday, November 6th, 5:30 – 7:30 In The Glass Coffin, first published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, a plucky little tailor finds a miniature castle encased in glass:
“Everything was small, but exceedingly carefully and delicately made, and seemed to be cut out by a dexterous hand with the greatest
exactitude.”1 It’s a description that delights in detail and craft, and reflects a nineteenth-century fascination with observing the world
under glass. As the story continues the tailor finds a second glass
chest with a beautiful maiden inside. He pushes back the bolt to free her, thus breaking the spell, and her castle is soon returned to its
normal size. While fairy tales employed magic spells to keep their heroines
suspended in altered states, scientists of the Victorian era were
finding that chloroform could work almost as well. After Queen Victoria consented to a light anesthetization by chloroform during the
birth of her eighth child, butterfly collectors seized on the compound as a useful means of suffocating their specimens without damaging
them.2 By this time, a mania for insect collecting had unleashed swarms
of collectors into the countryside (including Darwin who had caught the bug at Cambridge and later suggested in his autobiography that “a
taste for collecting beetles is some indication of future success in life”3). Popular instructional booklets taught budding naturalists how
to mount and preserve their tiny treasures and Victorian parlors began
filling up with artificial and often extravagant displays of nature. In the same year that Her Majesty underwent childbirth for the eighth
time, the London Zoo mounted an unprecedented exhibition of live fish and invertebrates that featured 14 tanks of marine organisms housed in
a crystal palace of glass and iron. The self-taught entomologist and
marine biologist Philip Henry Gosse procured many of the specimens and helped to design the aeration system used in the tanks. By all
accounts, the sea anemones stole the show. The Literary Gazette described this tank as presenting “a splendid harmony of colour hardly
to be surpassed by the hues of a skillfully dressed flower garden.”4
Gosse went on to write A Handbook to the Marine Aquarium and over the next decade the household aquarium was born.
If nature had found its way into the home, it found ways of making itself amenable to the Romanticism of the era. These microcosms under
glass produced an enchantment all their own that today seems more akin
to the seductions of a fairy painting than the rigors of a scientific pursuit. In her novel The Biographer’s Tale, A. S. Byatt underscores the distinctly Victorian perspective of her narrator as he watches stag beetles jousting: “I looked through the glass and suddenly,
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
briefly, lost my sense of scale, seeing armoured monsters lurching on
a rugged battlefield, glossy carapace, and wonderfully articulated, tremulously wiry limbs.”5 While the tiny world of beetles and
butterflies was not the grand Romanticism of Turner and Friedrich, it did provide something heroic and sublime for those possessed of a
magnifying glass.
The British mythographer Marina Warner has written that, more than anything else, “metamorphosis defines the fairy tale.”6 It might well
be said to have defined the whole Victorian era, and it certainly defined Darwin’s understanding of nature. But the world under glass
offered, however briefly, a mirror of nature, an unbroken spell, the
chance for a world exhausted by its own metamorphosis to play Dorian Gray.
Today we see through glass differently. Search engines and liquid crystal displays have made it easy to collect and recreate the world,
but the accelerated pace of digital expansion is mirrored by an
unprecedented rate of extinction among plants and animals, as well as human languages and cultures. Digital collections, like ARKive and
the Encyclopedia of Life, are making efforts to compile photographs and video footage of threatened species, and it seems likely that
these repositories may soon be our only connection to many of these
natural wonders. As virtual encounters displace lived experience it is increasingly possible to imagine a future in which our own lives
are contained under glass. But for now I’m keeping my windows open. Who knows what rare moth might find its way into my studio?
Robert Amesbury, summer 2009
1 Brothers Grimm, “The Glass Coffin,” Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 2009) 87. 2 Anne Fadiman, “Collecting Nature,” At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) 4. 3 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005) 63. 4 “The Aquatic Vivarium,” The Literary Gazette (London), as quoted in
New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian 22 October, 1853: 4. 5 A.S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale (New York: Vintage International, 2000) 244. 6 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and
Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994) xx.
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Arachne, 2009 Gouache on paper 67” x 40”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Blue Butterfly, 2009 Gouache on paper 67” x 40”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Bookworms, 2009 Gouache on paper 44” x 39”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Cricket Cage, 2009 Gouache on paper 18” x 16”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Double Doyle, 2009 Gouache on paper 27” x 32”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Heliotropes, 2009 Gouache on paper 44” x 36.5”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
Sleeping Beauty, 2009 Gouache on paper 18” x 16”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
The Glass Coffin, 2009 Gouache on paper 18” x 16”
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
ROBERT AMESBURY
EDUCATION
1998 Harvard University, A.B. in Visual Studies, Magna Cum Laude
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009 Under Glass, Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston, MA 2007 Pronk, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA
2005 Robert Amesbury: Paintings, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009 Living and Dreaming, The Bronx Museum of Fine Arts, Bronx, NY
2007 NeoIntegrity, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY 2006 Global Pop, Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston,
MA 2005 Robert Amesbury, Scope-Miami Art Fair, Miami Beach, FL
2004 Off the Shelf: Robert Amesbury, Robin Dash and Rachel Perry
Welty, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY All About Love, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA
2003 Lisa Tung Selects: Robert Amesbury, The Boston Drawing Project, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA
2002 Winter Group Show: Rebecca lbel Gallery, Columbus, OH
Bound and Gagged: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA
2001 Summertime: Group Show at Rebecca lbel Gallery, Columbus, OH 2000 Half life, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge,
MA
1998 Senior Thesis Show, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA
AWARDS
2009 AIM: Artist in the Marketplace Program, Bronx Museum of the Arts,
NY 2008 Nominated for Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant
2007 Nominated for Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant
2001 Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
2000 Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
COLLECTIONS
Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
TEACHING
2008 Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, Colorado
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2009 Ken Johnson, “Young Artists Arrive, Either Rough of Ready”, The
New York Times, July 9, 2009 2007 Tonya Chen, Pronkin’ It To the Streets, Boston Common, Spring
pg. 231 Cate McQuaid, “Art & Reviews: A Glowing Reference to Painters
Past,” The Boston Globe, May 3, 2007
2005 Art: Culture Vulture, Sidekick, The Boston Globe, July 12, 2005 Cate McQuaid, Gallery Pick, The Boston Globe, July 7, 2005