Photo: Jenna Bascom Photography LLC, Jenna Bascom Photography
Photo: Jenna Bascom Photography LLC, Jenna Bascom Photography
Gold, silver, diamonds, and pearls appear alongside avant-garde materials including seashells, sand, paper, toy railroad tracks, vodka bottle shards, dominoes, and animal remains. Robert Ebendorf’s 2010 Untitled Daguerreotype Brooch combines a daguerreotype with copper, plastic, and a crab claw, while his Birthday Necklace incorporates repurposed jewelry and toy railroad tracks. Anna Johnson’s 2015 Betulina Brooch, meanwhile, combines an egret skull with rainbow moonstones, raw diamonds, mica, shelf mushrooms, and silver. “But we didn’t feature that many gems,” Gifford notes, “because they were almost a distraction from the story we wanted to tell.”
That idea of jewelry as a vessel for reinterpretation and connection between different wearers also runs throughout the exhibit. Felieke Van Der Leest designed her fantastical 2005 Rainbow Moose (sculpture with necklace), a plastic moose embellished with glass beads, gold, and silver, as a vision of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But Porter and Price saw the moose as a different member of the horse family, with the rainbow signifying pride. “Objects collect meaning,” Gifford says. “A maker can make things for particular reasons, but when someone else sees it, they see something different in it, so it continues to collect meaning and relevance.”
One of the most poignant pieces is Keith Lewis’s 1993 Dead Souls Neckpiece. A pivotal, chemist-trained contemporary jeweler who came out amid the AIDS crisis, Lewis became involved with ACT UP as friends around him began dying, turning to jewelry to commemorate those losses.
In Dead Souls, birdlike heads begin large and become progressively smaller around the necklace, ending beside a clasp representing the AIDS virus. The scale traces the epidemic as Lewis’s community suffered and dwindled. By the end, the clasp, which incorporates a personal poem, looms large in comparison, representing the virus overwhelming the community. “He thought that if you put human skulls, people would ‘other’ it,” Gifford says. “With birds, he hoped people would look at it with more empathy.”
