Introduction
Focusing on themes of the body, text, and receptacle, this exhibition explores the valences of “excess” through a fragmentary lens in two temporalities – the ancient and the contemporary. Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections holds a wealth of “excess” as an archive. Drawn from the Collection’s excessive inventory, the ancient objects in this exhibition come to us as fragments from the reaches and exchanges of the Mediterranean world. Acknowledging the lacunae in information, this exhibition seeks to reveal meaning both extrapolated from the objects themselves and their potential reconstructions. Similarly, in the contemporary context, we understand these objects, their formal, ideological, and theoretical properties, through fragments of information. The contemporary artistic response builds upon fragmentary knowledge, imagining the loss of information as potentials for new additions to an already excessive archive.
Together, these ancient and the contemporary displays provide a polar spectrum of fragmentary excess.
