精美的玻璃海洋生物标本

丹麦艺术家史蒂芬·达姆喜欢仔细观察他的祖父母收集的科学书籍和昆虫柜。在他的艺术玻璃生涯中，达姆创造了非常详细的陈列柜，这些陈列柜模拟了悬挂在玻璃瓶和玻璃板中的海洋标本。Dam在他的工作中“俘获”了自然，但是他努力避免简单的模仿生活，这位艺术家避开了他所谓的“廉价玻璃戏法”。他试图在“虚构与现实之间取得平衡”。虽然他的作品绝不是像“好奇之箱”里的标本那样，充当教学工具，它们的目的是吸引眼球，激发想象力。水坝里的小生物，虽然被冻在玻璃里，却提醒着我们如何阅读和感受时间和变化。

All images courtesy Joanna Bird Gallery unless otherwise notedAs a child, Danish artist Steffen Dam loved poring over his grandparents’ collection of scientific books and cabinets of insects. This fascination of how we catalogue and understand the natural world followed through to his artistic glass career, where Dam creates highly detailed “Cabinets of Curiositiesthat mimic oceanic specimens suspended in glass jars and plates. The pieces are usually displayed inside light boxes to better illuminate every minute detail from the fragile tentacles of a jellyfish to a flourish of bubbles that seem to dance around many of his specimens.A quote from David Revere McFadden’s essay Between Art and Nature, The Glass of Steffen Dam:Steffen Dam invites the viewer to relish the sheer beauty of his “specimens,” but also to reflect on the meaning of nature as a mirror of the human mind and spirit. Dam has “captured” nature in his work, but he assiduously avoids simple imitation of life; the artist shies away from what he refers to as “cheap tricks in glass.” He seeks to strike a “balance between fiction and reality.” While his work is in no way intended to serve as pedagogic tools, as specimens in “cabinets of curiosities” often were, they are intended to engage the eye and stimulate the imagination. Knowledge about the forms, structures, surfaces, and colors of true natural specimens is not to be found in Dam’s displays of crystal cylinders, but another kind of knowledge—that of the visual poetry of endlessly varied forms—is freely offered. Dam’s little creatures, although frozen in glass, remind of how we read and feel both time and change.Dam most recently had several pieces on view at Chicago’s SOFA Expo through Heller Gallery. You can also see several additional works at Joanna Bird.Photo by Christopher Jobson for Colossal / SOFA Expo ChicagoCourtesy Heller Gallery