Lost and Found
Lost and Found is an ongoing project in collaboration with artist Amanda Foulds. For this series, we consider the museum’s role as a collector, archiver and cultural institution by documenting it’s Lost and Found collection. By photographing the objects left behind by visitors, our intention is to learn more about the visiting public while considering the accession, ownership and aesthetics of objects, as well as an institution’s cultural values.
Museums house an archive of objects from civilizations past and present, with the expressed intent of learning from these artifacts, the stories about the peoples that made them.
It is our belief that not all of the museum’s collections are documented. Drinking vessels, textiles, writing materials, and other objects left behind by the public are collected in an archive rich with interpretive possibility: the museum’s lost and found.
Viewing the collection of objects in the lost and found as an unconscious community collaboration of sorts, we study, photograph, and interpret the objects left at galleries to learn more about their visiting public. The objects have been photographed as though they were accessioned by the museum and then curated into narrative groupings which lend themselves to questions of ownership, aesthetics, authenticity and cultural values.
Individual items from this project are posted weekly at @lostandfoundmuseums page on Instagram
