November 13, 2014 - December 13, 2014
An Un-natural History concerns itself with the human desire for order and perfection through an investigation of our attempts to control nature.
These seductive images take as their subject the Blaschka Glass Flower display at the Harvard Natural History Museum in the USA. The museum case here acts as metaphor in an attempt to organise the natural world. With their tension between representation and abstraction, order and chaos these paintings question the glass flowers as objects of scientific certainty, and subvert the museum as a site of control.
Like earlier work, Kahan plays with ambiguities of space, scale and the reflective qualities of glass, creating a strange yet wondrous world.
