Museum of Unnatural History: New Works by Elaine Bradford

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Art League Houston

January 9-February 20, 2009

Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of Museum of Unnatural History, a dioramic installation of new works by Elaine Bradford, on view from January 9 - February 20, 2009.

Museum of Unnatural History consists of dioramic displays similar to those found in natural history museums, and which serve as "natural habitats" for the artist's fantastical crotchet covered taxidermy creatures.

The opening reception for Museum of Unnatural History is on Friday January 9, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. with an artist talk at 6:15 p.m.

This exhibition, which takes place in the Main Gallery of the Art League, opens in conjunction with our Front Gallery presentation, the Gold Key Art Exhibition, featuring the winners of The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of the Harris County Department of Education.

As part of Museum of Unnatural History, two free docent led tours will be conducted for the public on January 10 and February 7th at 2:00 p.m.

For Museum of Unnatural History, Houston-based artist Elaine Bradford has created a faux natural history museum filled with a variety of animals and specimens "discovered" by the fictitious fringe scientist Dr. Thomas Harrigan during his explorations into a dimension known as "The Sidereal". According to the museum's pseudo-scientific text,

The Sidereal is "in many ways a mirror image of our world [that] has produced a variety of species possessing adaptations wildly divergent from those we see on earth."

A visitor to Museum of Natural History will view creatures that include the Pushmi-pullyu (Tragus januali), a lichen eating two headed sheep; the longcat (Lynx metamorpha), a blue mite covered feline whose powerful limbs and body can expand up to ten times their at-rest length; and the Procyon besheret, fondly known as the "pair-bears" due to the permanent fusing of tails during a secret mating ritual.

The animals on view are constructed from taxidermy animals, sometimes in their original state, other times cut in half or fused with the bodies of others, which are then sheathed in outfits which Bradford carefully crochets, an art taught to her by her grandmother, when the artist was a child growing up in Alice, Texas.

Elaine did not really appreciate the calming, repetitive act of crochet, nor did she take it seriously as an art, until she was in graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts. Here Bradford developed a project in which she crocheted individual sweaters for everything in her refrigerator, including all the baby carrots.

"I was really interested in the connotations that came along with crochet for me, ideas of comfort, warmth, and family; the absurd act of making labor intensive objects for things that have no need for them always makes me chuckle."

Around 2004, the artist decided to make crochet clothes for taxidermy, after sitting in her parents' house and looking up at the hunting trophies on display. Bradford remarks, "It struck me how beautiful the deer head would look in a sweater."

For the next five years she produced numerous and more and more fantastical variations on this theme. Elaine considers Museum of Unnatural History the culmination of all her taxidermy animals, as it will be the most elaborate presentation of the work to date and the last opportunity for audience members to view her crochet covered animals.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Elaine Bradford received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in May 2000, and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in May 2003. She is now living and working in Houston, TX. Her most recent work involves crocheting sweaters for taxidermied animals. She has shown extensively across the United States. Her work has recently been exhibited in group shows at Greenlease Gallery in Kansas City, MO, MassArt in Boston, MA, Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA and in the Galveston Art Center in Galveston, TX. In 2007 she had solo shows at Women and their Work in Austin, TX, Hunt Gallery in St. Louis, MO, and Cactus Bra in San Antonio, TX. Bradford is the recipient of a 2008 Individual Artist Fellowship Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance.