Mystery of the Musty Hide by Lee MarchalonisIn no other field are the rules of typographical design as steadfastly adhered to than in the world of fine press printing. Refined over centuries, the ratios of margins, the nuances of letter and line spacing, and the hidden intent behind justification have all come together to form a language that all readers are unknowingly fluent in. The conventions, however, are aggressively manipulated by Lee Marchalonis in her work The Mystery of the Musty Hide. Contrasting a contemporary work of non-fiction by Kendra Greene with a historical text by the famous taxidermist Carl Akeley, Marchalonis uses our ingrained design sensibilities to create a heightened viewing experience. The contemporary text, printed from handset metal type, is elegantly designed, guided by the most conservative of standards. The historical text, however, is printed in red from hand carved linoleum, filling the margins of the otherwise conventional spread. This contrast, between the imprint of the metal type, biting into the paper, and the slowly fading, irregularly printed, unrefined scrawl of the block print precariously resting on top of page, harkens to the violence which underlies the narrative. Fading as we turn the folios, the red ink reflects the passage of time, as eventually the voice from the past diminishes to nothing.

Artist Statement

Natural History museums have lately been my particular destination, as the habitat dioramas provide a particularly fruitful location for musing about representation, narrative, and artistry. They include fascinating inconsistencies: in order to make them more powerfully ‘real’ they must first be exceedingly carefully constructed. My recent work looks at data collection, storage, access, and presentation through the lens of the natural history museum.

The Mystery of the Musty Hide includes two main texts: the one printed in black ink has been composed specifically for this project the other is a found text. Alison K. Greene’s text contextualizes and describes the theft of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker mount from an exhibition on extinction. I have presented her text in handset 8-point Century Schoolbook metal type, surrounded by another text that has been carved into linoleum and printed. The surrounding text is excerpted from Carl Akeley’s autobiography, and describes an elephant hunt and subsequent skinning of the animal in the field order to prepare it for inclusion in the African Hall of Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Included in the book also are three images: a photogravure of a Grevy’s Zebra from the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, collected by Akeley, the utterly convincing stoic expression of which, in combination with the crumbling skin of the belly acted as the impetus for my further research, a sheet of paper I made from flax fiber and treated to give an impression of elephant skin, and a snapshot taken in the archive of the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History of the remaining two Ivory-billed Woodpecker skins mentioned in Greene’s text.

In placing the two texts uncomfortably close to each other, my goal was to mimic the clash of contradictory thoughts and emotions I experience when examining a beautifully deliberate environment of an early 20th century habitat diorama, designed and executed by Carl Akeley. The creator’s original intention is no longer the most dominant or relevant aspect—instead, the diorama represents an absorbingly handmade static recreation of a scene we generally consider best represented by an entirely different medium: film, just arriving as Akeley was completing his work. Akeley’s dioramas continue to hold a place of honor in the Museum of Natural History in New York, and the layers of historical and personal subtexts that accompany them are rich and deep.

Carl Akeley and My Stepfather  The left image in the diptych is of Carl Akeley posing with a leopard he had managed to kill barehanded. The right image is of my stepfather Peter Elzer, posing for a newspaper photograph with a jaguar cub when he was a zookeeper at the Melbourne Zoo.

About the Artist

Lee Marchalonis has an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and studied Book Arts at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She was a 2013-2014 recipient of the Stein Scholarship, a year-long residency awarded by the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY. She has taught at Parsons The New School, Montclair State University, University of Iowa, and the University of Tennessee. Her work can be found in numerous collections, including those at Carnegie Mellon, Lafayette College, and the University of San Diego. Currently she lives in Detroit where she is the Printer-in-Residence at Signal-Return Press, a non-profit community letterpress studio.

Mystery of the Musty Hide by Lee MarchalonisMystery of the Musty Hide by Lee MarchalonisMystery of the Musty Hide by Lee Marchalonis

Photos by Joel Grothaus

UAG

Contact Information

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