Reception and Gallery Talk
Curiouser and Curiouser: Exploring Image and Identity in Alice in Wonderland

Curator Rachel Aisenson '13 will give a gallery talk about her experience curating the exhibition and about the ideas she explores in the show; refreshments to follow.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) have fascinated and inspired readers, scholars, and artists for the past 150 years. Through the text and especially its illustrations, readers have been invited to explore questions of self and identity. In Wonderland, Alice is taken out of her quotidian Victorian context, and left alone in a mysterious, semi-real world - the ideal position for an adventure of self-exploration. There she encounters a daunting series of reality-warping identity trials. Does her radical exploration deconstruct or build her character? Through books and ephemera, this exhibition presents diverse visual interpretations of Alice, and her physical and psychological challenges - offering Alice as a way to investigate the nature of identity.