Until the recent rise of the nexus of gallery/art fair, the museum has been the single most undeniable fact of the art delivery system. As an arbiter of meaning, as architecture, as embodiment of social architecture, as art history manufacturer, as biographical Madeleine, ad inf ad nauseum it is one of the juiciest of all the subjects currently of interest to artists and curators. In her recent exhibition at Queen’s Nail Annex artist Erlea Maneros, of Los Angeles, and originally form Basque Country in Spain (read: Bilbao and the Guggenheim Bilbao) used photography, paper objects drenched in ink (as opposed to drawings), and a wall painting to take her whacks at this formidable Sequoia of the art world. The San Francisco art historian Julian Myers organized the exhibition.

Erlea Maneros, The Artist In His Museum, 1822, apprx. 14"x20", india ink on paper, 2007.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, founded and operated by the MacArthur-winning artist David Wilson, owes its entire existence to a parallel investigation: the deconstruction of museum authority. Wilson pushes his museum’s exhibits to the edge of believability and beyond in order to find that exact moment when the visitor will exclaim, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” Maneros, like Wilson (it is one of his museum’s logos and the image that she painted on her gallery wall), begins with the Peale Museum, America’s first, in 18th century Philadelphia. Like Wilson’s Jurassic, Peale’s Museum was heavy on animal displays, notably the the first mastodon skeleton discovered in America. Maneros may be implying that the museum as institution is a dinosaur of another age, but her photographs of museums from all over the world betray a certain ironic fondness for them as well. These images are taken online with the least possible attention paid to the fineness of the resulting image. In fact, it appears that the dust on the computer screen is highlighted more than the occasionally difficult-to-read representation. Again, it is easy to infer a certain “dust to dust” disdain for the institutions depicted. The heavy mediation of the pictures, however, defers such one-to-one meaning and launches the photographs, and the exhibition, into more ephemeral emotional waters, a certain nostalgia for the corniness of cabinets of curiosity and the pure fun of speculative fiction.

As part of a curatorial assignment this writer recently selected a series of figure studies based entirely on images trolled off of flickr.com. All the images were based on 50s science fiction films. It’s amazing how rich a source, how evocative and suggestive, that silly genre can be in our collective psyche. Maneros’s images of the exterior of a dozen or so museums certainly suggest both that architects have been dipping into the same dream pool of images as the filmmakers of half a century ago, and that these buildings (and thus the goings-on inside) are as strange and alien a group of invaders from another world as could be imagined.