Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 24

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Figure 7. Martha Glowacki (American b. 1950), Deconstructing Flight: An Homage to Étienne-Jules Marey (detail), 2017,
mixed media installation, size varies. Photo Eric Tadsen.
stand how looking through something, in an attempt to
“fix” it as a two-dimensional image, transforms it. Viewers
also get to watch participants and witness the process
of looking as something active, offering a visual surprise
or joke when the gallery display is inverted through the
camera’s lens.
Deconstructing Flight: An Homage to Étienne-Jules Marey
(2017) makes this interest in understanding the tech-
nology of vision even more apparent by attempting to
capture the motion of a bird’s wings through stop-mo-
tion photography. Glowacki transformed the taxidermy
cockatoo by containing it in a harness that echoes one
used by Marey to study the displacement of air and
designed a pair of fabricated bird wings for a human
model. The installation investigates different kinds of
movement—animal, human, light, the eye—and the
problem of representing this movement. The large
model wings are actually crafted from piano felts and
a piano’s interior mechanism, suggesting the rhythmic
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Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections
transmission of movement into sound, from moving
sculptural wings to static projected images (Figure 7).
Glowacki is helping viewers see that the process of rep-
resenting motion is both arbitrary and aestheticized—
and like the plant that must be cranked in a specific way,
along a specific track, is recorded in a prescribed way.
It challenges the possibility of accurately representing
the true sense experience of a thing or process—turned
upside down by a lens to allow for accurate tracing or
transformed into a series of points and lights these
installations reflect the impossibility of transmitting a
direct sense experience.
The collector’s cabinet and specimen cabinet have been
important reasoning tools for Glowacki. Like scientific
prints depicting specimens or experiments, cabinets and
their representations suggest a way of ordering and cre-
ating knowledge that offers a specific view of the world.
Historically, cabinets were tools for bringing sense expe-