The disembodied spirit

This catalogue accompanied The Disembodied Spirit Exhibition presented at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Art and the Austin Museum of Art.This exhibition was a unique interdisciplinary exploration of art and culture in the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century involving the depiction or suggestion of ghosts. This major exhibition examines the social and cultural circumstances in which ghosts entered public discourse while considering as well the manner and media through which the ghostly has been rendered in images. The Disembodied Spirit observes how artists have represented absence while still indicating presence-using formal elements such as transparency, light, shadows, and weightlessness-and their manipulation, alteration, and exaggeration of these characteristics. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue essays examine cultural phenomena, such as Spiritualism in the late nineteenth century, as well as the contemporary fixation with cyberspace, virtual reality, and the less techno-hip phenomenon of angels. Included are works by nineteenth-century photographers such as William Mumler, Georgiana Houghton, Julia Margaret Cameron and contemporary artists such as Jeremy Blake, Nancy Burson, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Ann Hamilton, Glenn Ligon, Tracey Moffatt, Mariko Mori, and Bill Viola.