The fossil and feathers and nest depicted in Suzanne Stryk’s “The Collector’s Question” represent the sort of personal shrines that collector’s create. They sometimes put their collections into orderly ranks, as Stryk does with birds’ eggs in one painting (and as Todd Murphy did for real recently in a work at Lowe Gallery).
Just as often, they put unusual pieces next to one another.Stryk’s show at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, “The Collector’s Confession,” suggests the dialogue between art and science that goes on in the mind of most collectors of natural objects. The collector may go for organized completeness, but the original impulse has something to do with the beauty of single things, whether feathers, nests, or fossils. What they have to do with one another sometimes comes later.
Stryk’s show at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, “The Collector’s Confession,” suggests the dialogue between art and science that goes on in the mind of most collectors of natural objects. The collector may go for organized completeness, but the original impulse has something to do with the beauty of single things, whether feathers, nests, or fossils. What they have to do with one another sometimes comes later.
But for most collectors, that curiosity eventually comes. The Fernbank Museum is full of collections presented as science but meant to arouse curiosity and, just maybe, aesthetic wonder. Though Stryk didn’t create these paintings for the museum, they’re an effective commentary on the idea that knowledge often begins with the experience of beauty.
