Oddments Room II (Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle)
A jumble of incomplete volumes and damaged tomes, some perilously arranged, fill the Oddments Room of the antiquarian bookshop Maggs Bros. Ltd., in London. Jane and Louise Wilson made these two photographs—part of a series of six, each named for a book depicted within—while researching their video work about Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished Holocaust film, The Aryan Papers. The central feature from each photograph—a mysterious woman in vintage dress and a peculiar black and white measuring stick—relates to research images they found in Kubrick’s vast archive. Appearing in a shrine to fragmented literature, these phantom figures from the unrealized film cast collective history as a labyrinth of inadequate narratives.
Artwork Details
- Title: Oddments Room II (Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle)
- Artist: Jane and Louise Wilson (British, born 1967)
- Date: 2008
- Medium: Chromogenic print
- Dimensions: 86 3/4 × 69 1/4 × 1 1/8 in. (220.3 × 175.9 × 2.9 cm)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Gift of the Marron Family, in celebration of the Museum's 150th Anniversary, 2020
- Object Number: 2020.99.2
- Rights and Reproduction: © Jane and Louise Wilson, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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