Alternative Steampunk
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From October 2009 to February 2010, Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science hosted the first ever exhibition of Steampunk Art in the world. Steampunk artists, loosely defined, are those who, “in imagining a Victorian future that has not come to pass”, cast an oblique light on the present and create magnificent pieces of imagination. Their art is bejeweled with the mechanical and the fanciful, the historical and the contemporary, reveling in the ingenuity and absurdity of mechanism and the art of making. The art creates a sense of wonder, with a bit of fun.
The exhibition featured works of numerous artists, including Kris Kuksi, Eric Freitas, Daniel Proulx, Amanda Scrivener, and Molly Friedrich. Curated by Arthur Donovan, a steampunk artist himself, it gathered much attention in the media and proved to be a grand success according to the officials of the museum. Indeed, it was a visual delight.
The pictures in this photo essay have been tweaked to look at the same exhibits in a slightly different light.
Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. Akshat is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.
