The Medicine Chest

Items

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  Rice child (Stirrings)

  "An object-study of a grain of rice by the artist Elaine Gan similarly shows the intermingling temporalities of humans, nonhumans and machines through an assemblage of images, text and vectors maps. Gan explores four temporalities within this research – the time of technologies, matter, memory and a calendar year – and installs the work as a long horizontal strip that cannot be viewed in full from a fixed position but encourages the viewer to walk ‘through time, occupy multiple positions’ and in so doing ‘trace new connections’ (Gan 2021). Time-travelling over two thousand years, Rice child (Stirrings) (2011) begins in the Mekong Delta, where the farming of champa rice facilitated the formation of stable settlements. It then follows a selection of rice varieties, revealing how they became technologies that accumulate socio-political formations, and weaves through the 2007/8 food crisis" (Liebenberg 2021: 28).
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  Resonance (Greenblatt)

  In 'Resonance and Wonder' Greenblatt discusses ‘resonant’ moments in regards to museum displays as “those in which the supposedly contextual objects take on a life of their own and make a claim that rivals that of the object that is formally privileged. A table, a chair, a map – often seemingly placed only to provide a decorative setting for a grand work – become oddly expressive, significant not as a background but as compelling representational practices in themselves. These practices may in turn impinge on the grand work, so that we begin to glimpse a kind of circulation: the cultural practice and social energy implicit in mapmaking is drawn into the aesthetic orbit of a painting, which has itself enabled us to register some of the representational significance of the map” (1991: 22- 23). For him a resonant exhibition often “pulls the viewer away from the celebration of isolated objects and toward a series of implied, only half-visible relationships and questions” (1991: 23).
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  Resonance

  Image from page 137 of the 'Curiosity CLXXV' catalogue, describing resonance and its application in MRI technology.
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  175 chalk-board dusters

  For the exhibition, 'Curiosity CLXXV', the curators took an old duster from each teaching venue and replaced it with a new one.
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  Einstein's abstracts

  Cibachrome on aluminium. Microscopic magnification of Einstein’s equations from a blackboard that had been preserved in the History of Science Museum in Oxford
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  Amelia

  Amelia explaining her flight plan
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  Amelia

  Amelia Earhart explaining her flight and the welcome she received