The Pomona Museum project
Gretchen Hillhouse & Dan Armstrong
Community History Museums are frequently perceived as repositories for a diverse array of memorabilia, accumulated from miscellaneous sources, labelled and archived for posterity in an enthusiastically amateur manner. History is located in the past tense: once-functional objects are arrested in dustproof cabinets and recontextualised as historical displays, serving to evoke long-forgotten memories and speculations on mortality. Strange connections arise between past and present epochs through the presentation and interaction of numerous, disparate objects. Crowded displays form surrealistic juxtapositions: here, a pickled snake in a jar through which a set of gleaming (false) teeth can be dimly observed; there, an ancient hypodermic syringe menacingly pointing to a WWI gas mask. Without the objectivity afforded by a view at a distance, many stories simultaneously clamour to be heard in a tiny space. Such displays inspire comparisons to the modern museum 's own ancestor, the treasure trove of the Wunderkammer or curiosity cabinet of the 16th century.
Recently, Noosa Regional Art Gallery invited Adelaide based artists Gretchen Hillhouse and Dan Armstrong to provide a contemporary artistic perspective on the history of Noosa through an innovative collaboration with the Noosa Museum at Pomona. Their resulting installation at the gallery, entitled Sound and Say, selected material from the local historical museum that commented on both the human and material aspects of the museum as an institution.
Connections between the people and the objects in the museum became crucial in determining both the format and content of the artists' intended installation, and were developed through discussions with the museum's volunteers over an informal lunch. While material objects formed the basis of a museum's collection, it was their tangible, but transient, link to humanity that underscored