Perfect Specimens: Photo Exhibition by Mark Kessell, Last Rites Gallery, NYC

I just found out about "Perfect Specimens," an interesting looking exhibition featuring work by one of our favorite Observatory presenters Mark Kessell. The opening reception is free and open to the public and will take place tomorrow night--August 17th--from 7-11 PM, at Last Rites Gallery in New York City; the exhibition will be on view through September 21st. Full details follow; all images ©Mark Kessell; more details below:

Perfect Specimen: Photos by Mark Kessell
August 17-September 21
Last Rites Gallery
Hours: Tues-Fri 2-9pm, Sat 2-9pm, Sun 2-6pm
Phone: 212.529.0666
Location: 511 W. 33rd Street, between 10th & 11th Avenues (3 blocks from Penn Station), 3rd floor, New York, NY 10001

Last Rites Gallery presents Perfect Specimens, a solo exhibition by New York photographer and artist Mark Kessell. For Kessell, art is truly a matter of life and death. Kessell, who trained as a physician, has spent the last two decades interrogating our existence through works that focus closely on the human life cycle, a universal yet intensely personal issue. Perfect Specimens explores the fundamental processes of human becoming and unbecoming, documenting what he describes as a species portrait, a map of our existence from the first stirring of life to the final phase of post-mortem decay.

These eleven works, images of the not-quite-born and the not-entirely-dead, drawn from a total of thirty-nine in the series, represent specific moments in the cycle. Initially created as daguerreotypes - a historical photographic process known as much for its potentially lethal toxicity as for its weirdly reflective surface - these works now appear as large-scale prints that allow viewers to delve deeply into both the subject and themselves.

Kessell poses a simple question: "When does being human begin and end?" As the fetuses and dying faces of Perfect Specimens illustrate, the answer is elusive. For many, the issues are moral and ethical, but this artist's approach is purely analytical.

Despite its capacity to provoke complex and sometimes disturbing emotions, Perfect Specimens is not intended to shock. Instead, its forthright depiction of the human life cycle allows space for personal reflection, an acute awareness of a shared experience. It is a chronicle of the finite nature of life.

At times, Kessell has shown us that horror, from a certain dark perspective, can be a form of entertainment - we see this, for example, in his movie-poster image for Eli Roth's Hostel - but Perfect Specimens offers no such escape. In this artist's uncomfortable perception, the human animal lives its life without drama and without significance. We come. We go. We leave barely a trace.

From our tenuous beginning to our irrevocable end, Mark Kessell's lyrical but clear-eyed gaze shows us the triumphs and horrors of being human. He brings grace and beauty to the complex questions of our existence.

Watch Mark Kessell's interview on YouTube here.

About the Artist

Originally trained as a medical doctor, Mark Kessell has been a professional photographer since graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 2000. After initially working as a daguerreotype artist, his practice has expanded to include installation, animation and sound as well as photography. His work focuses on the intersections between art, science and technology, with a particular emphasis on the construction of human identity. His works have been featured in a range of newspapers and magazines, and have served as illustrations for movie posters. He has been featured in the documentary feature film "Artists and Alchemists," as well as in the New York Times. His works are held in major collections worldwide including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Art Houston, the International Center for Photography and George Eastman House.

You can find out more by clicking here.

All images by Mark Kessell Images, top to bottom:

1. The Residue Of Vision
2. Continuing To Act
3. The New New

Early 19th Century Corrosion Cast of a Child: Guest Post by Carla Valentine, Curator of Barts Pathology Museum

I am so excited to announce that the amazing Barts Pathology Museum has launched a blog! On the blog, curator Carla Valentine will regularly report on her detailed research into the over 5,000 fascinating specimens she cares for at the Grade II listed Barts Pathology Museum at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, West Smithfield, London.

To celebrate the launch, I asked Carla if she might like to write a guest post about one of my favorite pieces from the collection which I had admired in the recent Museum of London's "Doctors, Dissection and ResurrectionMen" exhibition.

Following is her post; If you like what you read (and see!) I  urge you to check out the wonderful--and delightfully image heavy--blog by clicking here.

After a short stint at the Museum of London's 'Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men' this year I’m happy to say the above specimen – a corrosion cast of a child covered in shellac - has found its new home here at Barts Pathology Museum. It was originally housed at our sister hospital The Royal London, which is of course the home of Joseph Merrick (The Elephant Man) and in fact it was Frederick Treves, the man who ‘discovered’ the Elephant Man, who actually purchased this specimen on a trip to Paris in the 1800s.

We don’t have much more information about the child except that it probably pre-dates Treves by a long way and is from the early 1800s.

‘Corrosion casting’ similar to this was developed by such pioneers as Jan Swammerdam (above, Wikicommons) and Frederick Ruysch (below, Wikicommons) as early as the 16^th century and was still popular with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomists. Swammerdam and Ruysch had created a technique to inject the blood and lymphatic vessels of corpses with a mixture of wax, talc and pigments that set and endured, and often the surrounding flesh was corroded or removed. Anatomists were still using Swammerdam’s syringe to inject mixtures of varying proportions into their specimens until the early 20^th Century.

According to Museum Vrolik, Ruysch had created the art of injecting specimens with a wax-like substance, dyed red with cinnabar, so that they could be more lifelike when displayed in jars (similar to the pink-tinted embalming fluid used to make loved ones more lifelike today.) However, he also injected tissues and organs which he then ‘embalmed and dried’ which would be more likely to give the dehydrated look of this specimen. In addition to such methods Ruysch introduced a new way of embalming specimens (based upon techniques already known by the ancient Egyptians).”

 
The passage reads: “Examples of organs in the Vrolik collection that have been injected with wax or dried include placentas and penises and, in particular, human and animal hearts. In order to make their anatomical structure more visible, in some cases one half of the heart was injected with red wax and the other half of the organ was injected with dark blue wax. Dry specimens, like bone and certain membranes, were dehydrated by exposing them to the external environment and subsequently coating them with a kind of varnish. The majority of the dry organ and tissue specimens were coated with shellac after drying.” A fate which seems to have befallen our shellac child in his entirety.

Shellac is an incredibly versatile substance which is secreted by the female Laccifer lacca (Lac Beetle), an insect of the order Hemoptera or the ‘true bugs’. It’s well known for it uses as a varnish for garden fences, paintings and musical instruments, but perhaps more surprising is the prevalence of edible shellac compounds in the pharmaceutical and food industries: it is found on medicinal capsules, in the wax of apples and lemons and on confectionery such as M&Ms. Used to limit water loss and prevent dessication, as well as to limit entry of pathogens, it is fairly obvious why this would be a good preservative for prepared anatomical specimens.

The interesting thing about this specimen is that it looks old and of its time – perhaps by using techniques mirroring those of the Ancient Egyptians, Ruysch ensured that an appearance of antiquity was an inevitable by-product. Medical students faced with a specimen such as this today possibly would not value its use as a teaching aid as much as they would have in those heady days of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries and would relegate it to the realms of ‘interesting’ and ‘unusual’ artwork but nothing more.

However that shouldn’t be the case – a study from 2011 was carried out to illustrate the use of shellac as a modern preservation method to replace the dangerous and carcinogenic formalin/formaldehyde which is currently used in dissection rooms. This study (Ref 2) has shown that shellac will preserve a new cadaver indefinitely in a way that is non-toxic, and said cadaver can also be placed into a softening room and in three days’ time be ready for student to use in their dissections. So it seems that an outdated yet beautiful specimen such as this can be used to inspire future generations of medical students and will also be a fascinating talking point on the ground floor of Barts Pathology Museum.

1) The Anatomical Preparations of Frederick Ruysch
2) Shellac: A Non-Toxic Preservative for Human EmbalmingTechniques

You can find out more about Barts Pathology Museum by clicking here. To can check out their new blog by clicking here. You can find out more about Carla Valentine by clicking here.

Image credits: Top image: Joanna Ebenstein; all other images of the specimen: Barts Pathology Museum, QMUL; portraits: wikimedia

Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display; International Conference at the Department of History of Art, UCL

This exciting conference--free and open to all!--just announced! Looks like a good one; so wish I could go!

Cultures of Preservation
Prepared specimens appear in many guises: as monstrous or typical organs preserved in formaldehyde and kept in glass jars not unlike pickled food, as stained and fixed tissue slices, or as skilfully arranged mounted animals. They may be found in cabinets of curiosities, in the laboratories of histologists, in anatomy theatres or in natural history collections, but nowadays equally in art galleries, the shop windows of fashionable boutiques, or horror films. This research network is concerned with such kinds of preserved natural objects, in particular with anatomical wet or dry preparations and taxidermy. It explorses the hybrid status of these objects between nature and representation, art and science and studies their fabrication, history and display.

The network is a collaboration between the UCL Department of History of Art, UCL collections, in particular the Grant Museum of Zoology, the Hunterian Museum, London and the Natural History Museum, London.

Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display
International conference at the Department of History of Art, UCL
Thursday 17 May - Friday 18 May 2012

The past twenty years saw an explosion of exhibitions fathoming the relations between art and science as well as numerous refurbishments of natural history or former colonial museums. Many of these displays and gallery transformations mobilised specimens, be it taxidermied animals or preserved human body parts. Objects were put into new contexts opening up their meanings, others disappeared in storage or travelled back to the countries where they were once collected. The conference will address the challenges institutions face when dealing with formerly living entities and consider the aesthetics and politics of their display. The idea is to discuss the use of specimens in temporary exhibitions, museums or university collections and the role curators, art and artists have been playing in the transformation of these spaces. We also would like to consider how preserved specimens have changed through the altering contexts in which they have been displayed. One could name the initial transformation of organisms into objects, the more recent re-definition of pathological specimens as human remains, or the dramatic rearrangements that took place when natural history, anthropology or anatomy collections (many dating from the nineteenth century) were updated – coinciding with a shift in audiences, from specialists to a broader public. Often the historical displays were significantly altered, or even destroyed and replaced by „techy“ but at times also sentimentalised, „post-modern“ installations that still await a critical assessment.

Beyond that, the question of preservation shall be considered in a more expanded sense, as this subject area offers a unique opportunity to reflect more broadly on issues of conservation and their ethics and to raise a variety of questions such as: How and why do various cultures preserve elements of what is considered as nature? How does this relate to environmental notions of conservation and extinction? Should flawed specimens be disposed of? Can museums as a whole be considered cultural preserves? Should we preserve the preserves? And last but not least: Do we really need to embalm everything?

Confirmed speakers: Claude d'Anthenaise (Director, Musée de la chasse et de la nature, Paris), Steve Baker (Artist and Art Historian, Norfolk), Christine Borland (Artist, Glasgow), Mark Carnall (Curator, Grant Museum of Zoology, London), Nélia Dias (Anthropologist, Lisbon), Anke te Heesen (Museology / European Ethnology, Berlin), Petra Lange-Berndt (Art Historian, London), John MacKenzie (Professor Emeritus of Imperial History, Lancaster), Robert Marbury (Artist / Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy, Baltimore), Angela Matyssek (Art Historian, Marburg / Maastricht), Lisa O'Sullivan (Curator, Science Museum/art-history/events/culture_of_preservation London), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Historian of Science, Berlin), Rose Marie San Juan (Art Historian, London), Johannes Vogel (Director, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin)

Detailed programme: For further information please contact
Mechthild Fend m.fend(@)ucl.ac.uk or Petra Lange-Berndt p.lange-berndt(@)ucl.ac.uk

More information available here.

Job Opening: Assistant Conservator, The Royal College of Surgeons of England

Fascinating job alert! Full details below.

Assistant Conservator
The Royal College of Surgeons of England

£20,000 pa (36 month contract starting 4 January 2012)
Central London

With a worldwide reputation for educational excellence and state-of-the art teaching facilities, the Royal College of Surgeons of England is committed to enabling surgeons to achieve and maintain the highest standards of surgical practice and patient care. Our Museums and archives, including the renowned Hunterian Museum, offer a fascinating and vital insight into medical history and are an invaluable teaching aid that need constant care and attention.

As part of the Museums and Archives team, in this training post you will learn the skills involved in caring for comparative and human anatomy across the RCS collections. As well as auditing, monitoring and recording the integrity of our collections, you'll clean and maintain items, monitor the environmental conditions in the museums and stores and dispose of conservation waste material safely. Remedial conservation such as preserving, mounting and refurbishing will also be an important part of the role, as will ordering the necessary materials and equipment and working with the Head of Conservation to refine and develop efficient and safe conservation techniques. Last but not least, you'll recruit, induct and supervise the volunteers working on zoological materials within the museums.

Ideally with a relevant degree or museum qualification, but definitely holding a level 3 vocational qualification or equivalent, you also have practical experience of working in a museum or similar environment. A sound understanding of safe practice in the workplace is also essential, including awareness of Health & Safety issues. Reliable, consistent and with a 'can-do' approach, you're adept with Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Outlook and Excel. What's more, you have clear communication skills, an openness to new ideas and the ability to follow technical instructions. The post involves coming into contact with heavy objects and some hazardous chemicals for which full training will be given. Any experience of handling human or animal tissues in a museum or laboratory context would also be an advantage.

Benefits include:

25 days' holiday (plus 4 closure days)
Defined Benefit pension scheme
Flexitime
Subsidised restaurant
In-house gym and squash court
For further information on this role and to apply please visit www.rcseng.ac.uk/about/working using reference 25/11.

Closing date: 2nd October 2011

We are an employer fully committed to our equality and diversity policies. We will judge you on your abilities and nothing else.

More on the job can be found here.

Photos of specimens from the Hunterian Museum of The Royal College of Surgeons of England by Elaine Duigenan; more here.