Chambre Ardente :: Scranton landscape

Desert landscape (Now vanished diorama from the Natural History Museum in Las Vegas)

Sometimes even the most stay-at-home recluse like myself bumps into someone who appears to have it all. Julie Dermansky seems to fit the description. It’s just as well she lives on the other side of the globe from Terra Incognita.*

From what my people tell me, she spends her time in the shadowy recesses and storerooms of museums around the world. Taking photographs of the most curious and beautiful things that she finds there. Her pictures are a veritable 2D Wunderkammer.

And she’s daring. She turned away from a reportedly idyllic life of a sculptor and image maker, practicing from a farm in upstate New York, selling everything to pursue her current projects.

More, she has an exhibition on right now at the exceptional Everhart Museum. ‘Natural Selections’ focuses on some of the more than 30,000 objects in the Everhart’s natural history collection.

This vast collection is primarily due to founder Dr. Isaiah Everhart’s fascination with ornithology. As a result, the Museum has one of the most extensive collections of birds in the United States. The Everhart is one of the few museums to value and preserve its past. If I was anywhere near Scranton I would certainly put seeing it on the very top of my list of things to do there. Just under seeing Dermansky’s exhibition.

Everhart Museum >>
See what you’re missing if you can’t see the exhibition for real… Dermansky’s website >>
Her Flickr photostream >>

Giant Squid

*I'm just relieved that she is so busy documenting other people's museums that she can scarcely have time to start one of her own. I can just tell that acquisition would be hard-fought. And if I find that she’s somehow nabbed Inky too… well, there’ll be hell to pay!