New artists add to old at B'klyn museum

The Brooklyn Museum, one of the oldest and largest in the country, is stirring in some fresh ingredients with "Raw/Cooked," an exhibit that gives local artists the opportunity to display their works side-by-side with its venerable collection.

The show is a yearlong series of five exhibitions by under-the-radar Brooklyn artists.

In many instances, the new works interact with the museum's collection, nestling in the same cases with millennia-old objects.

But not all. Some artists opt not to invade the collection, but simply install their work on its own.

One of the artists in the series, Lan Tuazon, has taken up the challenge three ways in her exhibition, "On the Wrong Side of History."

In one part of the exhibit, she's installed seven small sculptures side-by-side with ancient Egyptian artifacts. Here, she ignores the chronological and geographical layout of art, opting instead to group her sculptures by function and thematic relationships.

She's also made drawings that quote well-known pieces in the collection. Finally, she created a large piece by recycling the museum's discards. From old wooden platforms and Plexiglas vitrines used to display art, Tuazon has crafted a new work, "Monument to Museum Preservation."

"If you're an artist, you make art so it can exist in this case. The museum is the process that cures a thing into art," said Tuazon, who came to the United States at 10 from the Philippines, and has her master's in fine arts in sculpture from Yale University.

"I just basically created a monument to speak to that effort of preservation."

Tuazon's installment, which runs through Jan. 15, wittily riffs on various classic pieces in the collection. Her sculptures are meant to be "formal interpretations of the artifact's conceptual content." These interpretations unfold in the context of seven types of relationships, or "resemblances."

Witness the Egyptian canopic chest, which the ancients used to hold vital organs removed during mummification. Next to it, Tuazon has placed a piece called "Copula: Thumb Hospital."

It is small silhouette of a thumb, with what appears to be a tiny picture window on its side. The pieces are connected by their common use as containers for body parts.

Shura Chernozatonskaya, the next artist to exhibit starting Jan. 26, is a painter who will display her work in the museum's airy Beaux-Arts Court, with the European paintings.

"It's extremely exciting and I'm hoping that my pieces will talk to the pieces of the past, basically," she said.