In Conversation With Susan Malmstrom, Part II

by Wanda Waterman
The Voice Magazine, Volume 22 Issue 31 2014-08-08

“You’re wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you’re right. She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can’t talk her out of it.”
– Truman Capote, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Susan Malmstrom is an artist specializing in digitally produced photography. She grew up in California, receiving 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, an insatiable curiosity, a love of memorabilia, an obsession with strangeness, and a delightfully twisted sense of humour. (Check out her amazing portfolios here.)

Her current project, The Repository of Wonders, is a traveling exhibition built around the remnants of a 19th museum collection “inherited” from a fictitious Dr. Mycenae T. Consonant, daughter of an Egyptologist and an archaeologist, who earned degrees in archaeology and art history before embarking on the lifelong adventure of building her own museum collection, traveling 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.)

(Read Part I of this interview here.)