In Conversation With Susan Malmstrom, Part I

by Wanda Waterman
The Voice Magazine, Volume 22 Issue 30 2014-08-01

Susan Malmstrom is an artist specialising in digitally produced photography. She grew up and studied in California, received a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of California at Irvine, and has lived in Canada since 2004. Her life’s work manifests a sense of wonder, curiousity, a love of memorablilia, an obsession with strangeness, and a delightfully twisted sense of humour. (Check out her amazing collection of portfolios here.)

Her current project, The Repository of Wonders, is a travelling exhibition built around the fictitious remnants of a 19th museum collection “inherited” from Dr. Mycenae T. Consonant, daughter of an Egyptologist and an archaeologist, who earned degrees in archaeology and art history before she embarked on the lifelong adventure of building her own museum collection, and travelled the world to collect artifacts before eventually going down with the Lusitania. Susan Malmstrom, now the museum’s curator, recently took the time to answer Wanda Waterman’s questions about what brought her to such an unusual undertaking. (Read the interview here.)