#zymoglyphic

The world's only repository for the study and display of Zymoglyphic art, artifacts, and natural history. It is located in San Mateo, Calif

I am a big fan of the website Atlas Obscura-- it's a compendium of strange places, and a great way to learn esoteric things about your city. We took a short trip up to San Mateo, California today to see about the Zymoglyphic Museum, open only a few days a year. As the intro photograph says, it's in a suburban cul-de-sac. A small, weathered sign reading, "MUSEUM" points the way to a shed housing a strange assemblage of taxidermy, miniatures and dioramas with strange descriptions. Artist Jim Stewart has created a dusty, strange world of Frankenstein'd creatures and ephemeral art. When we asked if he did taxidermy, he said, "A lot of these things... it's amazing what can be preserved just by drying it out." 

So, what is the "Zymoglyphic?" A handy pamphlet tells us it means 1) "Of, or pertaining to, images of fermantation, specifically the solid residue of creation fermentation on natural objects", and 2) "The collection and arrangement of objects, either natural or weathered by natural forces, for poetic effect."

So... it's a lot of weird seeds, dried sea animals, shells, moss, tiny plastic people, glass bubbles set together in dioramas and collections.  The artist has invented a culture of the Zymoglyphic and gives us a view of his brain though these assemblages. As a lover of "tiny things", myself, I had a lot of questions. 

Me: What's your favorite natural formation to work with?

JS: Anything with lots of holes in it.

I totally agree. He gave me a quick tour of his studio, just a beautiful mish-mash of railroad figurines, dried bugs, fake eyeballs and dryer lint. Actually, that last one was this, a cloud sculpture of loose wool and strings:

Each exhibit was labeled, and the dioramas had mysterious descriptions such as:

A plastic angel and a dead bird greet and intriguing but invisible new arrival.

Tiny aliens have landed in a recently desiccated area. They manage to hunt down something to eat. An even tinier, unsuspecting motorist approaches the scene. 

Decay WIP

2012

 For some reason, some of my photos are teeny-teeny-tiny. So, that looks like it needs to be fixed.

Well, here goes this again. I hope I can actually continue this time. I was inspired by my sister’s blog, The Shelf of Broken Feathered Things (http://brokenfeatheredthing.blogspot.com/) to try and restart blogging. –That, and I need a place to put my portfolio and collection of online resume tidbits. – My sister is a bio student, aspiring to surgeon… hood? (Surgeonhood? Is that right?). She’s very smart and funny and has amazing insights. Her blog is part media, part art, part science, part social commentary, and so is really worth checking out. I named my blog to kind of reflect what she was doing. She has a shelf of broken, feathered things, and I cram piles of lovely, rusty trash into my dorm room. It all works out in the end. I may actually be Salad Fingers in disguise, though I prefer the term zymoglyphic packrat.

For some trivia, Braggadocio, and randomly assorted personal doodads:

I’m an art and English student, trying at writing, fine arts, and video/animation. I’m currently fulfilling an internship with Dark Moon Digest, a quarterly horror magazine. And, self-promotion aside, I’d really suggest checking it out. It has all kinds of horror goodness (stories, poems, reviews, cartoons, illustrations), and plenty of contests for aspiring writers. It’s small now, but I think it really has potential to grow. And, seriously, who doesn’t want to see a revival of the pulp magazine? I know I do!

Otherwise, my resume includes selling cartoons and studio art, as well as poetry and short story publications in magazines and anthologies. Currently, I am working on a domestic/social satire novel set in the lovely Pacific Northwest (my homeland), a collection of short stories about boxes and the people inside of them. I’m also starting preliminary work for an independent study in stop-motion animation, which I will begin in the fall of 2011. On the side, I secretly hope to relearn the violin so that I can play fiddle tunes in the American folk ballad tradition and annoy my neighbors.

One of my ongoing projects involves the half-cartoon-half-fine-arts project of Grim World. The two morbid, drawings of fetus-like characters going through strange, dark, awkward situations are from this series. I hope to make an entire collection. Currently, there are several miscellaneous drawings and a series about true love, romance, roses, anthropophagic activities, and the lingering horror of steak sauce.

In my work, I like to convey the general weirdness of the world. I think that every situation has potential, and that potential should be exploited in the strangest manner possible. Take eating spaghetti, for example. Anyone can eat it, but at any moment you could, theoretically, pretend the pasta has transmogrified into flesh-eating worms that are trying to devour your face. The possibilities are, truly, endless. I like to mix cuteness and morbidity in my work. I’m drawn to almost kitschy cuteness contrasted with horrible, violent events. I think that it satirizes the comfort and fluff of what people decorate their houses with by pairing it with the sides of life no one wants to look at. I think that through humor and exaggeration, one can make a point that stays more clearly than self-serious didacticism. And, it’s just more fun, all the way around.

My other interests are in nature. I see two animals, the fish and the deer, as being symbols in my work for freedom and femininity. I wanted something that is feminine but not from the definition imposed by external, male-dominant culture. The ocean is often depicted as being ruled by a man (Neptune), but I think that’s erroneous. Water carries life in fluid. How much more obvious is the femininity? The fish is my totem connection to water, and it’s something beautiful that isn’t initially beautiful. It’s not a weak, delicate thing, and it’s not pretty. But, it’s still graceful and beautiful. The deer, on the other hand, is a wild creature, totally connected in my mind with wilderness and the untamable. They appeal to me as a symbol for what I love in life and as an answer to domestication and complacency. I’m a humanitarian, eco-theorist, feminist, I suppose.

My career goal, at this time, is to go into independent film and video making. I’m looking to enter the Pittsburgh Filmmakers in Pennsylvania next year. My interest is in documentary and low-fi, microcosmic dramas (my imagination is fairly microcosmic), as well as animation and cartoons. My animator heroes are Jan Svankmajer, the Quay Brothers, Miyazaki, and Jhonen Vasquez, who really is a demented genius.