Cassiopeia 1 (Verso) 1960

Curator: Looking at Joseph Cornell’s "Cassiopeia 1 (Verso)" from 1960, what grabs you first? The way it's built, bit by bit, like a forgotten treasure? Editor: It feels incredibly hushed, doesn't it? Quiet observation of the grand and infinite, packed into something you could hold in your hands. Like keeping a universe a secret. Curator: Exactly! It’s an assemblage, a mixed-media collage that evokes both landscape and something portrait-like, cosmic in scope. Those circular constellations on either side immediately root you to some realm between science and wonder. Editor: Those twin celestial orbs framed above classical motifs, set against a textural stratum of obscured texts, conjure this sense of floating, almost a double helix unraveling. It almost forces you to question our place in the world—the old and the new. Curator: Cornell was brilliant with evoking nostalgia. There's the obvious visual draw, but what about the ideas? It's playful. Do you think he actually mapped this celestial object and then layered them on the page himself? Or borrowed the constellations to then create his own. Editor: Cornell as cosmic cartographer, indeed. It almost doesn't matter because it evokes what I think that Cornell means: dreams. Look at this. Everything is deliberately set, almost creating tension: figures observing a shooting star alongside a poised statue. He makes these very small, intentional visual equations for the eye. Curator: Those contrasts are signature Cornell! It's both simple and complex—his ability to bring such divergent objects into the same place at once, the here and now meeting some distant celestial beyond, creating that sort of surreal magic. What makes a piece by Cornell, one can truly be moved and feel connected to these items from yesterday? Editor: I would offer this: its inherent melancholia; the bittersweet awareness that all these found objects had a life once before this artwork. Curator: Mmm, very true! Cornell really distills some precious and lovely feeling here, so effortlessly. It's like he is calling us to look for ourselves as the observer, searching and wanting to reach up to the stars to dream. Editor: An ode to infinite human creativity: art gazing into science, meeting sentiment and nostalgia.