This is not an art show: on mixed forms of visual culture
is more a visual essay than an artwork, this exhibition braves what Dave Beech has described as ‘the Enlightenment horror of motley concoctions’ to demonstrate the latter’s long and lusty history in images and artefacts. Building on her recently published book, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture: From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Digital Diversity, (Bloomsbury 2021), Mary Anne Francis presents a wall-based text that finds hybrid forms in all kinds of cultural space: from carnivals to cyborgs, gadgetry to gastronomy, and agitprop to architecture, among much else. This exhibition asks us to review any lingering horror of the hodgepodge, perhaps to ask: what might mixed form do for you?
