Shirley Brown /-/- Vestiges (review)

This book documents a project by the artist Shirley Brown, inspired by twenty-nine bird skeletons that she discovered in an old stove on her abandoned family homestead in 1996. She not only uses them as subject matter for a series of painterly oil studies and images in old photo albums but she also utilizes the skeletons themselves by displaying them in decorated wooden boxes. As the book's title suggests, 'Vestiges' are traces of something no longer present, in this case a lost bird civilization, a fictional world that Brown has created. She mimics the way a museum might display and interpret artifacts from an ancient civilization by fabricating a whole material culture and iconography for these birds, even hinting at their religious beliefs by placing bird images in shrines! Brown's underlying intention is to use her mythical bird civilization to mirror humanity, causing us to reflect on the comparative fragility of our own existence. Using vitrines, artifact storage boxes, descriptive labels, and taxonomic style displays, she employs a wide range of museological devices. She even includes a mock museum gift shop in her installation, complete with postcards, mugs and t-shirts.

Conceptually, Shirley Brown's project is not particularly original or unique, but is part of a wider artists' penchant for creating fictional artifacts and museum-inspired displays. Back in 1971 Christian Boltanski made a series of works entitled 'Vitrine of Réference,' where he displayed his personal keepsakes and fabricated ethnographic-style artifacts with typed labels and explanatory texts as if they were relics of some past, lost culture. In 'From the Freud Museum' (1991–96), Susan Hiller's installation comprised fifty customized brown cardboard boxes similar to the type used for archaeological specimens displayed in a vast vitrine. Each box contained a diverse range of fictional artifacts, individually titled, dated, and captioned, and some of them were annotated in an ancient or unfamiliar language. Perhaps an even closer parallel to Brown's project was Joan Fontcuberta's series called 'Fauna' (1987–90), for which he made a convincing museological display based on the work of an invented character called Professor Ameisenhaufen. His extensive archive of notebooks, laboratory observations, and field photographs was used in conjunction with specially modified taxidermied animals to make their fiction more plausible. In common with Brown's 'Vestiges,' these projects challenge the notion of evidential facts presented in museum displays where artifacts and natural history specimens are used as proof of truths. Museum displays are essentially a construction, an invention of narratives in order to express or emphasize specific values and opinions. 'Vestiges,' with its collection of 'displaced' specimens and artifacts, both celebrates and critiques the poetics of traditional museum display. Brown has created an imagined lost civilization that she animates through a mock archaeological and anthropological process. Like those rather macabre nineteenth-century museum displays of taxidermied animals, stimulating our curiosity and wonder, her project also expresses the idea of life 'frozen in time.'

Since it's essentially a catalogue for a two-site exhibition held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in 2005, one has to question whether the publication has a justifiable life of its own. It follows a predictable format, with the almost obligatory director's preface, an artist's statement followed by essays by the two curators of the respective hosting institutions. Cathy Mattes's contribution is very lucid and informative, while in contrast Mary Reid's is a more whimsical piece of 'creative' writing which enters into the spirit of the exhibition's subject matter. It begins as a fictional account of the former life of one of the birds, 'Flicker' (in 'the enchanted Land of Flickery'), and is written to personify the bird's life in human terms. Her account is interwoven with details of the displayed artifacts such as the clear quartz crystals, the gaming pieces, and the crystal bibles, and she explains their function and amuletic symbolism. She refers to Shirley Brown as an...