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The Victorian Curiosity of Michelle Samour
Michelle Samour of Boston Massachusetts is the perfect example of an artist whose distinct eye finds the art already in nature. Samour focuses especially on microbiology, single celled organisms and other such specimen. Her work often revolves around recreating these organic forms and grouping them together in interesting ways on different materials. She is fascinated with the way singled celled protozoa are formed symmetrically and how their two halves mirror each other. Her artistic lens focuses on these organic forms by relating them back to the human body as a whole,. She also cleverly relates them with inkblots used in therapy sessions. Using this basis for her work, Samour is able to create a seemingly living and moving tapestry of color and light. This tapestry is reminiscent of the busy nature of life on all levels. She combines beautiful colors and materials to create an intersection between strange and lovely.
Her interpretation of life at its smallest becomes a delicate pattern that leans towards the Victorian fascination with the natural world. In fact, Samour often uses a Victorian style to showcase and frame her work. Her collection “Drawn and Mirrored” specifically focuses on this style two-fold, in that it is displayed much like a Victorian Era Parlor, filled with frames of varying sizes. Where ordinarily there would be silhouettes of family members, Samour's frames contain vibrant singular organisms captured and placed on the wall much like blown up inkblots, pretty to look at but also holding some deeper meaning. The wall is packed with frames, color and symmetry, and is chaotic and beautiful all at once.
This Victorian Style comes from the plethora of Natural History Museums in London and all across Europe during this era. These museums often showcased cabinets in varying sizes, shapes, and ornateness that contained scientific collections from around the world. During this time England was expanding greatly in terms of power and territory around the world. A sign of this power was the intellectual ability to discover and collect as many “specimen” from these “acquired” territories as possible. There was a strong need to discover and define the unknown. Therefore “Curiosity Cabinets”, which were a function of the Renaissance Era and were shelving structures used for “encyclopedic collections of objects…” became popular. These shelving structures would sometimes take up entire rooms, and were boundless in what they could contain or display. During the Victorian Era, however, Curiosity Cabinets became much more contained into what we today understand as such a cabinet, which can open and contains drawers and shelving generally for display.
Cabinets of Curiosity became popular in museums as a way of showing off the specimen found from scientific explorations during expansion. They were often immensely crowded to show as much diversity as possible. In fact it was often commented on that there was no real methodology to the organization found in these cabinets, which were often put together based on size, shape, and/ or color of the specimen or even simply from the region. A patron of such a museum would often times find cabinets filled with entirely unrelated things. However Curiosity Cabinets were extremely popular during this time, and this idea expanded greatly into everyday lifestyle, and smaller versions of Curiosity Cabinets could be found in homes and elsewhere. These were generally used for educational purposes, and had drawers or trays that could be pulled out to look at specimen.
Samour uses the same ideas of the Victorian style to create works that look like packed curiosity cabinets, with no distinct order or organization, filled with color, and different shapes, yet united in their symmetrical nature and vibrant varying colors. These vibrant depictions of micro-organisms, from afar, give the effect of an array of large insects.
Samour also uses this reference to Victorian sympathies to our modern fascination of the constant stream content we get from many technological mediums. The commentary on “Drawn and Mirrored” summarizes this connection between these two time periods within Samours work and why it is still very relevant, "These historical impulses to collect are analogous to the impulse to accumulate information in the digital age, in which computers and phones have become virtual wonder cabinets of visual and textual information.”
