The White Cabinet (2006) and Anatomica (2007), Lisa Nilsson
I have selected my two favourite boxes from Lisa Nilsson's series titled Relics & Specimens. These are The White Cabinet and Anatomica. The series explores the value of collectable and found objects and blurs the distinctions between collectable, scientific specimen and holly relic. It delves into three areas that infuse objects with value: the private sphere, the scientific and the religious.
(Detail of Anatomica and The White Cabinet)
The White Cabinet reminds me of pharmacology and sterilized glass cabinets found in apothecaries or clinical environments whereas Anatomica brings sex and death into a silk dark secretive closet. For me they represent the rational, antiseptic sphere of a mind obsessed with order and control and it's nightmare: the repulsive body it inhabits, ruled by animalistic impulses, lust, gluttony and brutality.
Diseased flesh, decay, body parts, guts, stitched skin, a fetus and allusions to the female body (the marble head, the hourglass shape, the red circle-perhaps a womb, an ovule?) kept inside an erotic small vault both alluring and threatening to the male scientific world. A clean environment of compartmentalised solutions displayed in clear glass. Light radiates carefully arranged series of items, a manual of labels and definitions should accompany such array.
