Myriorama, an exhibit presented at Veronique Wantz Gallery

According to the Huntington Museum, the myriorama is a toy originating in the 1820’s:

…the myriorama—whose name was derived from the Greek words myrias, meaning “multitude,” and orama, meaning “scene” or “view.” A myriorama comprised a set of illustrated cards, each representing a slice of a landscape. No matter what order you placed them in, the cards created a cohesive scene.

I played with one as an infant. I remember a camel in a desert. Fun! Rearrangements numbered beyond the numbers I knew then. I wanted to match that feeling here, today. Hence an abstract myriorama, with endless possibilities: what goes with what, and again what: more panels than a visitor could easily count, all remountable and rearrangeable, covering all the gallery’s walls in splendor (or squalor). Confusion and delight: a jeweled box turned inside out.

I painted 451 panels. It was just one thing after another, and sometimes my blood was hot with possibilities – theme and variation and whatever I came to notice. Assaulting the surface with feather, bones, newsprint, maps, palette plastic, transgressing the picture plane: new materials, new tools (becoming intimate with a box cutter), new techniques for me. Or sometimes if it pleased me and I thought up some confluence with what panels came before, harking back to line, luminance, chrominance, massing and armature: the well-trodden vocabulary of the abstract academy. My mind was a magpie. A power I don’t easily recognize stirred it, made up in equal parts elation, hilarity, and fatigue.

When I thought, I thought how the eye should dance around over this surface or that, rotating the panel until I could confuse left and right, top and bottom, as an abstraction properly should be: lawless even in the face of gravity. I was fast on a stair that led up to elsewhere. Sometimes I was painting the Sistine Chapel with hands full of Crayola chalk. Etchings of octopi, birds and bees were scissored from some inoffensive piece of paper and glued in place – they could buzz in my mind’s ear as long as they sat before me on my easel.

But not for long! Lingering not allowed: I spent 18 months assembling the assemblage that is Myriorama, and had not a moment to spare. Now this time has gone. I will not have it again.

You can browse through them below, following the links.  Each will open up a page of 25 thumbnail images, except for the last page, which contains 26, to add up to 451.

Why so many panels, and why 451?  I needed this many to fill all the wall space at Veronique Wantz Gallery.  And 451?  To support free reading, which supports free thinking, which is in ever lesser supply here, these days, battered from both the Left and the Right.  It’s a not so subtle reference (I hope!) to a work that expressed similar concerns:  Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Although the show is over, the panels dispersed, you can still see them all by buying the catalog which is available to order here.

If you have a particular interest in a panel, get in touch with me by clicking on owenbrownartist@gmail.com.  It may not have been sold.