Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone

Snuffbox in the Shape of a Dog, Germany, c. 1740–50, stone, LACMA. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone focusses on the role of the imagination in perceiving images in the natural markings of stones. The product of a collaboration between LACMA, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, this exhibition brings together objects that utilize the natural features of stones and places them alongside similar works in other mediums for context and comparisons. Eternal Medium ranges from historical to contemporary with the earliest work from c. 2200–1800 BCE to recent pieces by Analia Saban, Alma Allen, and Ben Gaskell. Featuring many pre-20th century works such as the Dagger of Emperor Aurangzeb with a nephrite jade handle (Mughal India, 1660–61) and Jacques Stella’s Jacob’s Ladder painted on onyx ca. 1650, the exhibition is drawn from LACMA’s collection with loans from the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the V&A and the V&A’s own collections, as well as public and private collections in California.

The exhibition comprises nine interrelated sections: “Hard” Stones; Sourcing Specimens; Manipulating Multicolored Stones; Seeing Images in Stones; Fooling the Eye; Flora and Fauna; Heaven and Earth; Stone for Stone; and Transcending Stone. Each section considers where the materials came from, demonstrates how their innate characteristics were translated into illusionistic stone pictures and coloristic stone sculptures, and encourages visitors to understand the works in relation to similar images in other media as well as use their own imaginations to complete the imagery suggested by the stones and their markings.