Drawing from her athletic experience as a cheerleader for 9 years, Taylor Moon Castagnari has been exploring aerial circus. Specifically, her apparatus is the aerial lyra, a suspended hoop, on which she performs aerial dance and acrobatics. From Moon’s experience working in museums and receiving an art history undergraduate degree, she learned that modern museums’ origins derived from the kunstkammer (or cabinet of curiosities), dating back to the 1700s. More information about the historical practice of collecting for the Kunstkammer can be found at The Met Museum website (https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuns/hd_kuns.htm). This practice gave way to P.T. Barnum’s traveling show of human curiosities, featuring the Fiji Mermaid and General Tom Thumb. Thereafter, the Barnum and Bailey Circus was born. 

 

This shared history of museums and circuses sparked an idea in which Moon would integrate the theme of her aerial circus act into the museum and gallery spheres. Moon was interested in the way in which aerial body positions mirrored the poses of the statues of Greek antiquity, and even contemporary art statues. Moon compiled a photos and illustrations that juxtapose the physicality of both figures.