Mark Dion
TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
If Charles Willson Peale hadn't existed, Mark Dion would have had to invent him. Peale-a onetime clocksmith, silversmith, saddler, revolutionary, portraitist, natural historian, inventor, agricultural reformer, and museologist-was a living archetype of thejeffersonian polymath, embodying the impulse toward conquest through knowledge, categorization, and ratiocination that Dion explores and critiques in his own work. Peale comes to us as a figure in his famous self-portrait of 1822, where he stands before his Wunderkammer (portions of which would later be sold off to P. T. Barnum), raising a plush curtain to expose the illusory order within: …
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