Otherwise Invisible Seams: Micah Danges & Eileen Neff

Essay for the catalogue Part of (Un)Natural Histories, from the exhibition “New Grit: Art & Philly Now” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

From the essay:

Echoes of constructed viewership embedded in the diorama, the camera, the photograph, the greenhouse, and the consumerist display reverberate across translucent fabrics, opaque pictures, recursive windows, readymade sculpture, and copies of copied imagery. The installation incorporates simulacra of reality in manifold forms, yet none appear unvarnished or readily knowable. Rather, the artists’ (re)constructions become active participants in their own interpretation.

The diorama emerges most saliently in Neff’s Man in Blue Looking (2020), a photograph produced at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences. This genre of diorama, conceived by American and European natural history museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, borrowed some formal techniques from Daguerre’s creation of the same name. Many examples, including the twenty-six erected at the Academy between the late 1920s and mid-1960s, aimed to recreate naturalistic habitats of animals that museum researchers had collected on international expeditions. Institutions would present taxidermied fauna before illustrated convex backdrops, all fastidiously illuminated to produce a perspectivally aligned experience. In Neff’s photograph, these precedents converge with recent Academy conservation efforts during a large-scale renovation project. Two figures, one in a black coat and one in a glowing blue hazmat suit, face away from the viewer amidst painted mountains and trees. In its temporary, partial state of deconstruction, the tableau’s immersive qualities—and with them, their attendant subject/object binaries—fall away. The shadow-laden backdrop becomes disjointed from the scene’s projected narrative, announcing itself as painted surface.

Flush with the edge of the wall, the photograph’s installation undercuts the gallery’s own spatial inconspicuousness. Danges’ two photographic prints on mesh panels perform a corresponding operation, recontextualizing and transmuting the architecture within which they’re installed. The artist took the original photographs in and around a greenhouse maintained by the University of Pennsylvania’s Biology Department at James G. Kaskey Memorial Park in West Philadelphia. Rather than clearly framing the building or the plants inside, Danges trained his camera on the enclosure’s glass thresholds themselves. His images depict greenhouse walls, industrial window frames, rippling fern leaves—all subjects in absentia. By picturing the structure’s industrial-grade facade (which enables researchers’ control of environmental conditions), the artist’s views offer expansive, searching alternatives to those prescribed for close empirical observation.