The Zymoglyphic Museum

Just when hopes were fading that I’d find something to really excite me (and therefore, you) on the web today last night, I discovered The Zymoglyphic Museum, which is an absolute delight to an old Joseph Cornell fan such as myself. The museum is (mostly) the work of one Jim Stewart, who has been making art from found objects, with particular reference to the decayed, distressed and broken, since childhood – although how long ago that was is not divulged. The work occupies a place somewhere along the line between Cornell and The Brothers Quay.
Ordinarily, the museum is only to be found online, because the works are too fragile for straightforward exhibition, but there is to be a showing “probably the first weekend of May 2003″ at the Silicon Valley Open Studios.
Two sections of the online museum, however, are not Stewart’s work, although they are clearly related: there’s a small collection of Xenophora assemblages – the work of a species of marine snail which attaches bits of debris to its shell, probably either for camouflage or to stop them from sinking into the soft mud they inhabit. There’s also a section devoted to the work of eccentric 17th anatomist and tissue preservation pioneer Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), who constructed tableaux of foetal skeletons and used hardened, preserved body parts – lungs, major veins and so on – as landscape features. Quite a way further out than Herr von Hagens’ Body Worlds show…
(via Everlasting Blortzilla)