SPECIMENTAL
Carrier Bag Collective’s inaugural exhibition was held at Action Potential Lab in April 2023, featuring artists Liz DeCoste, Abby Kettner, Marcella Driver-Moliner, Anika Becker, Leah Klingbile, Jay Clarke, and Iris Adrienne Langlois Smith.
The word specimen typically implies a detachment; a piece of something; a sample. The collection of specimens continues to be a central aspect of scientific practice, but in this context they are most often seen as abstract artifacts. However, the practice of collection also expresses a deep sentimentality and presents complex questions about the way in which humans relate to nature. Specimental, Carrier Bag Collective’s inaugural exhibition, juxtaposes this sterilized understanding of specimen with a sense of the sentimental and asks us to re-examine the detachment that characterizes the way that we typically relate to our natural world. The exhibition presents work from seven artists who offer emotional, spiritual and creative interpretations of “specimens” from our environments and through collection based making. Artists explore the relationships they have with the world around them and its ephemera, particularly in an urban setting and explore the intersection of memory and environment, hybrid bodies, and symbolic language.
Approaching memory as a method of collection, Marcella Moliner-Driver’s 3D-modeled images commemorate artifacts found but not kept. By exaggerating the visualizations of these objects, Moliner-Driver’s work references the memory process, inevitably marred by emotional associations. In a similar vein, Abby Kettner’s City Skins series records landmarks in her urban environment that are seen but often forgotten—manholes, concrete bricks, mundane infrastructure. These latex skins act as both map and collection of Kettner’s urban surroundings, an expression of experience, of coming and going.
Similar explorations of memory are uncovered in Jay Clarke’s By Nurture, in which they create an ode of love and protection for past versions of themself through the curation of precious personal memorabilia. Moliner-Driver’s 3D renderings, Jay Clarke’s assemblages, and Kettner’s latex casts are memories of objects, places, and relations that are otherwise left behind.
Artists Anika Becker, Iris Adrienne Langlois, and Leah Klingbile investigate human-nature relationships through a variety of lenses. Becker and Klingbile present hybrid creatures and anthropomorphic anatomies to challenge understandings of human and animal bodies. They draw threads between science and art as both methods of knowing and collecting the natural world. Langlois likewise examines opposing ways of knowing by presenting assemblages and representations of the natural world with warmth and love—a juxtaposition to scientific approaches to “specimens”. Operating from a place of wonder, Langlois intertwines influences from her matrilineal ancestry, practices in magic, and daily urban observations to explore and express gratitude and grief for the natural world.
Artist Liz DeCoste employs the symbol of a snail shell, proposing a new symbolic language that connects nature and queerness. In various mediums, DeCoste examines the spiral form and the fluidity of life in order to examine the linkages between queer coding, symbolic language, and the natural world. Langlois also explores queerness, through the use of tulip buds—strangely sexual and often anthropomorphized, and yet disguised as a decorative motif.
Specimental juxtaposes this sterilized specimen with the deep sentimentality and love that we feel towards our collected items. A sentimentality that shakes us and scares us and moves us to create.