David J. Diamont photo
Greeting visitors to the current exhibition at Arts Fund Gallery, “Specimen,” is a kindly, smiley skeleton placed strategically and without explanation. It seems a combination greeter, sentry and memento mori, all at once, befitting a deliciously bizarre and strangely comforting show about pseudo-science, dead things, decontextualized memories, found objects redirected into the direction of art, and other cultural specimens.
Curator Ted Mills, himself an artist, filmmaker, and also journalist-critic (whose writing is oft-found in the pages of the News-Press) had the notion of collecting left-of-center collectors and assemblage artists. The end result, imposing a bit more weird atmosphere than the Arts Fund Gallery has yet known, is a gathering of radiant junk, artfully constructed “cabinets of curios” and general obsessive oddity, all under one roof.