the specious voyages
While it was a particularly small exhibition, Sheridan Kennedy’s The Specious Voyages nevertheless required the viewer to spend time with it. This was partly because one had to ‘find’ the objects themselves—they are small and often camouflaged in their environments—and partly to unravel the fascinating tale that was being spun before us.
The exhibition was set around a glorious romp of Kennedy’s alter ego Dr D.N. Keynes pictured as a frumpish natural scientist working in the field in the continent of Terra Recognita. Dr Keynes journey to the New Hybridies was filled with self doubt—’when we get there will we recognise that we are here?’, she asks. And while Dr Keynes had hoped to build her scientific reputation on the work of others, she recognises that it is the phenomena that has escaped previous investigations (‘the free roaming facts that may be considered renegade or delinquent…’), where the greatest attention should be placed. Here we are very close to Kennedy’s own interest in sensations that cannot be seen or measured but nevertheless imagined in the reactions of the body to precious metals and stones and crystals used in adornment.
Dr Keynes fortunately brings with her instruments ‘attuned to such determinations’. She is alerted to the problems of deciphering fact from truth and recognises that all instruments will only deliver ‘what one already knows but doesn’t know one knows’. Dr Keynes speculates and recreates environments in her laboratories to try to solve questions about unique adaptations of species to their environments. Particularly at issue are the questions of decorative adaptations for the sake of it, rampant hybridisation and the development of new functionalities like the samurai fish, which creates a symbiotic