Uncle Unger’s Menagerie of Curiosities & Nearly Useless Objects

This is a collection of unusual objects that have been crafted to intrigue and amuse – to tickle the intellect and bring out a sense of play and wonder.  They have presumably been collected by Uncle Unger.  You know, the odd one with the unkempt hair, clothes from a different era, and a not entirely unpleasant odor of linseed oil, Morels, and tobacco.  The one who never married, living alone in that dark house filled to the brim with things the old man collected over the years - the house that always made you slightly uncomfortable but not enough to make you want to leave.

This art work was inspired by Fluxkits that were produced during the Fluxus art movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The kits were collections of items created by artists that highlighted the ideals of Fluxus Art - to be “simple, amusing, unpretentious, and concerned with insignificances”. Some of the pieces in Uncle Unger’s Menagerie were inspired by Bauhaus design principles. Some are also examples of Ready-Made art, where an object that has already been created for a specific purpose is recontextualized to invoke a new perspective from the observer.

Approachability was my primary focus with this artwork.  I wanted to create something that nearly everyone can relate to and interact with.  To achieve that, I produced a collection of objects with varying degrees of humor, mental challenges, and imagination.  While a few pieces may be out of reach for some people, the interaction with the pieces that are fully relatable (some are nothing more than manifest puns) will hopefully get the mental wheels turning in a positive way as the observer puzzles out the objects they can’t quite ‘get’.   

Beauty and tactility were other key objectives of the work.  Each object has been carefully crafted from scratch or curated from the world of found objects and meticulously mounted on teak (reclaimed from a Dutch colonial building constructed in Indonesia in the 1800’s).  They are not however meant to be exclusively looked at.  Most of them can be easily removed from the mount and held in the hand.  They are meant to be touched, rolled, spun and even dropped in one case.  Careful though.  One of the pieces is terribly dangerous and will destroy your computer if you’re not careful - though Uncle Unger would surely have laughed at that event. He did like to laugh…