Installation view, Obejvák Art Studio, Kolbenova, Prague, 21-22 July 2016
Photo: KagLoos
I have not been able to identify the botanical drawings in these images. In places there are annotations handwritten in Czech. Probably the originals date from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The photographs give details of a reproduction of the drawings on a paper sheet pasted onto the rear of a nineteenth century wardrobe, found in an antique shop filled with furniture beached like flotsam and jetsam on a foreign shore. The varnish brushed over the paper has over the years cracked to form a tangle of lines. These to my eye are reminiscent in their undulation of river plants swaying in the current, the flowers now borne in dialogue with this organic reticulation in an intermediate medium, between times. The original flowers may have long vanished (unless perhaps they were also pressed and dried and stored in a botanical collection) but were witnessed and thereby preserved in part by the drawings, which were subsequently reproduced, and this particular reproduction found itself on the rear of a wardrobe, which lived in various elsewheres and elsewhens, and which was stumbled upon one November not long ago by someone looking for something else. The photographs were then printed and framed and shown as something else, too. A continuing development of medium/form. I wonder whether the wardrobe has moved from its temporary holding place, adrift; if so, the picture pasted on the back is probably hidden, facing a wall.
