Every household has a way of keeping in touch with the world. The Grimsbys prefer this one.
An ornate wooden radio fills the frame, its worn cabinet arranged around a large circular dial. Brass-colored trim traces the instrument’s face, while narrow windows on either side carry flickering black-and-white images. Within these small illuminated spaces, medical and scientific fragments appear and disappear, turning a familiar domestic object into a peculiar apparatus for observation.
The close framing gives the radio an almost architectural presence. Its central dial anchors the composition while the moving images at its edges draw our attention back and forth. We are invited to examine its surfaces: the aged wood, the clustered controls, the curved glass, and the decorative lines that give the machinery its character. These details suggest an object that has occupied its place in the household for years, gathering familiarity through use.
Yet its transmissions resist easy explanation. A radio ordinarily brings an unseen world into a room through sound; here, images inhabit the cabinet itself. Its narrow windows offer partial access to bodies, instruments, and scientific activity. Their shape constrains what we can see, making each fragment feel like something glimpsed through an opening in a much larger system.
For a family devoted to science and oddities, such an object feels entirely at home. It could be a treasured possession, a source of evening entertainment, or an instrument whose purpose only the Grimsbys fully understand. The piece leaves those possibilities open. Its strange function acquires the persuasive familiarity of an appliance someone uses every day.
The absence of the household’s inhabitants allows their interests to speak through their surroundings. We learn about them through what they keep and what holds their attention. The radio becomes a small portrait of their domestic world: lovingly peculiar, absorbed in discovery, and furnished with objects that make curiosity a daily practice.
Filmed by Karen Jerzyk, the work brings the tangible surface of an old object into contact with moving scientific imagery. The cabinet remains steady while its windows continually offer something new to inspect. Looking becomes its own kind of tuning, our attention moving between transmissions in search of a connection.
Part of *The Grimsbys*, a moving-image series by Karen Jerzyk exploring a peculiar household’s fondness for science, oddities, and the mysteries that find their way home.
