An Art That Nature Makes

Filmmaker Molly Bernstein's remarkable documentary about Rosamond Purcell—a celebrated photographer specializing in creating images of natural artifacts, junk, and found objects—is wonderfully stimulating, even if the pictures of anomalies and detritus are a little creepy. Purcell herself comes across as a sunny, sensitive, intellectually curious artist who patiently persists at gaining access to her preferred subjects—usually taxonomy collections at natural history museums or found objects in junkyards. An Art That Nature Makes, which combines a generous sampling of Purcell's images together with insightful commentary from admiring filmmaker Errol Morris and others, explores how Purcell is able to find strange beauty and secondary purpose in everything from extinct animals to human molars, from shells to the skeletons of conjoined twins. Viewers will also see numerous examples of Purcell's Polaroid shots of oddly juxtaposed materials—torn book pages, the shadows of animal skins, insects—that are both mesmerizing and poetically dreamlike. A revelatory portrait of an artist who presents the daily artifacts that surround us in a whole new way, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)