Care and Wear: Bodies Crafted for Harm and Healing

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Detail of Painter’s Manikin from the estate of Francesco Gai (1835-1917)

a painter at the Accademia di San Luca. Rome. Textiles, horsehair, metal, and wood. Photo by: Blaine Campbell.

The Museum of Fear and Wonder is a collaborative project by Brendan and Jude Griebel. It houses and illuminates the Griebels’ collection of historical craftworks that possess uneasy emotional or psychological resonance. The Museum opened in 2017 but represents over two decades of active collecting by the Griebels. Inspired by a shared childhood spent deep in the imaginary, and adult professions dedicated to visualizing and communicating inner lives (they are employed respectively in Anthropology and the Visual Arts), they have gravitated to acquiring material objects that speak to a larger picture of how humans understand their places in this world.

Curated by the Griebels from the collection of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, Care and Wear: Bodies Crafted for Harm and Healing delves into the materiality of bodily experience: birth, growth, illness, anger, sexuality, disaster, frustration, and finally, death. As stated in their forthcoming essay on the exhibition:

“throughout history, crafted forms of the human body have served as important didactic tools to connect humans to their own bodies and encourage them to use those bodies to engage in specific ways in relation to others. In many cases, bodies are manufactured as surrogates, stand-ins for human experiences more challenging to deal with in the flesh. Regardless of their visual accuracy, we are encouraged to engage with these manufactured bodies as though they are real.”

To bring this collection into a contemporary art gallery places these crafted bodies under the sharp light of scrutiny, and requires the open acknowledgment that objects are never neutral. The objects that comprise Care and Wear are at once familiar and deeply unsettling. They are loaded with historical and contemporary political, social, and economic stakes, and thus are often emblematic of the paradigms of dominant society. The exhibition will ask viewers to question colonial practices of museum collection and display, and the problematic histories of representation in medicine, safety testing and training, sport, and play. Care and Wear will complicate the intended value and use of these objects, and foreground the complexity of their emotional and tangible impact. In the same breath, it will highlight the uncanny capacity of these imaginatively crafted objects to manifest and negotiate aspects of the human experience.