OBSCURIOSITY – Exhibition by Claudia Chan Shaw

Excited! My solo exhibition OBSCURIOSITY is showing 8 – 25 August 2018 at Art Atrium, 181 Old South Head Rd Bondi Junction.

The exhibition opening is:

on Saturday 11 August 2018

2:30 – 4:30pm

at Art Atrium

181 Old South Head Rd

Bondi Junction

to be launched by Ron Ramsey

Executive Director of the Art Gallery Society of NSW

And the following week, there’ll be an

Artist in Conversation : Saturday 18 August at 2:30pm

at Art Atrium 181 Old South Head Rd Bondi Junction

Here’s what it’s all about

During the Renaissance, private collectors roamed the world in search of the exotic, the fantastic and the bizarre. They discovered natural wonders and scientific marvels and displayed their accumulated treasures. This microcosm of the curious was often known as a Wunderkammer, or a cabinet of curiosities.

There was a need to categorise and organise the collections. A desire to create order. These collections multiplied and turned into entire rooms of displays, which morphed into the concept of the modern museum.

Claudia Chan Shaw has been a collector since childhood. She gathers, displays and arranges objects that remind her of another time. She collects memories. Ephemera, toys and trinkets that each tell their own story.

She has created her own cabinet of curiosities, and photographs treasures from her personal collection in dreamy still life photographs in her exhibition Obscuriosity.

Her intimate photographs invite the viewer’s own interpretation of their meaning and history. A wind-up tin bird offers its evensong from a tree; seahorses swim through an imagined underwater world.

Childhood memories combined with the artist’s eye for the intrigue of the obscure are explored. But like any memory, sometimes the real and the imaginary blur and that is where fantasy takes over.

OBSCURIOSITY. 8 – 25 August 2018