Champaign’s Figure One Gallery celebrates the opening of "A Cabinet of Curiosity: The Library's Dead Time," an exhibit created by GSLIS Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak and master's student Julia Pollack. The exhibit will be held at the gallery's downtown Champaign location (116 N. Walnut) on February 17-18 from 5:00-9:00pm. GSLIS will sponsor a reception on Friday evening.
[image1-left:resize-300w]The
cabinet of curiosity was a room in which early-modern collectors could
experiment with different ways of ordering the universe. Contents of the
cabinet might include specimens from nature—real or fake.
Pollack and Mak have brought together their own cabinet of curiosity and filled
it with examples of librarianship that are regularly overlooked in the daily
course of activities in the library. As an alternative archive of
librarianship, the "artefacts" in Pollack and Mak's cabinet reveal
the ways in which information continues to be carefully formulated and prepared
for consumption—not only in the library, but also elsewhere.
Guided tours of the artwork will discuss the practices of the librarian in the collection, classification, and curation of information.
Julia Pollack is an artist, a GSLIS master’s student, and a graduate assistant in reference instruction at the University of Illinois. Her work, “The Universal Standard Encyclopedia,” was recently featured in Accepted Knowing: Peer Review at the Figure One Gallery. Bonnie Mak is assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, and holds a joint appointment in the Program for Medieval Studies. Her book, How the Page Matters, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011.