Steve McDade BA, MA
Interventions - Worthing Art Gallery
Work from the Worthing Museum collection: Dolls House and various objects from display cabinets
The paintings (see link right) are a response to the Dolls House in the entrance foyer of the museum and to the display of objects in the museum collection. Many of the objects in the museum are domestic or work related and in a context that enables them to trigger associations and perhaps memories of similar objects encountered in the lives of visitors. The tug of recognition from the most ordinary or mundane of objects can set in motion whole train of memories and the recovery of lost events. The ordinary made extraordinary.
The transference from the world of everyday domestic or work environments into the museum enables us to reconsider each object as a precious and culturally significant artefact. Many of the objects are significant as historical documents but also have aesthetic appeal. The museum provides the ‘container’ in which we can view them in a new way; familiar but strange, transporting us into vivid recall of ‘lived moments’ or into imagined worlds and histories of people and places.
The role of museums has under gone a critical re-evaluation during the past two decades or so. The issues of ‘capture and display’ and of dominant narratives that supported an imperialist, colonial or at least a hierarchical status and that imbued a sense of worth to acquisitions has been replaced with a much more open and inclusive set of values. The idea of the museum as “the family sepulchres of works of art” (to quote Theodore Adorno)1 has been transformed into a more discursive and active relationship between viewer/visitor and the objects. This is true of the museum at Worthing. The range of exhibits and artefacts celebrates a community and local context. There is, however, a sense that the museum also presents the exhibits as ‘other-worldly’ or uncanny. Like a ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ emphasising the strangeness of everyday objects. The dolls house in particular is an object that is both comforting but also mysterious and somewhat sinister. I have selected the staircase of the dolls house as a specific focus as it has connotations of unease, of potential danger but also of moving through space and is an equivalence to moving through the museum.
The museum presents us with the ‘exoticness’ of our daily lives.
The two Perspex houses in the exhibition represent two institutions: The House and The Museum, with the series of small painting stretched out between the two. These houses also reference the dolls houses within the collection. These ‘miniature homes’ are, themselves, like a condensed reference to that domestic world re-configured as museum. Especially intriguing are the staircases within the dolls houses and their relationship to the stairs in the museum; a means of moving through the levels of the collection, of moving through time and space into the magical spaces of the display cabinets and hidden treasures of the museum.
[1] Quoted in Crimp. D (1980) On The Museums Ruins in Foster H (ed) (1993) Postmodern Culture London Pluto Press