Meet the Team

MIKE ZOHN, CO-OWNER

Obscura Antiques & Oddities co-owner Mike Zohn discovered antiques one day while learning how to drive, getting lost and coming across an antique store housed in an old barn. Hooked from then on, he started to buy — and learn about — all sorts of neat (and odd) things, including items related to circuses, sideshows, taxidermy and natural history. But he didn't just make purchases for his own collection; Mike supplemented his salary as a photo researcher and editor by buying items he knew he could resell at a profit ... funds he then used to buy things he really wanted. Before long, Mike found himself with so much stuff, he was going to have to either seek help for his hoarding addition or open a shop.

"Open a shop" won out when Mike's department at the stock-photo company where he worked was dissolved, and it seemed to make sense to "do the antique thing until I found a new job." That was in 1997, and he's been at it since then.

In order to find his Obscura inventory, Mike wakes up at the crack of dawn, driving hours in the dark in order to attend flea markets, auctions, antique shows, estate sales and garage sales. Even when on vacation, he's always looking for that place that just might have something good to buy. As for his typical customer, there's no such thing; they run the gamut from the heavily pierced and tattooed to celebrities like Danny Elfman to the most professional "just-walked-out-of-a-board-meeting" executive. What they do have in common, according to Mike, is an appreciation of the unusual and odd.

In his spare time, Mike gives lectures on 19th century taxidermy automata.

EVAN MICHELSON, CO-OWNER

An inveterate collector and museum aficionado, Evan Michelson is co-owner of Obscura Antiques & Oddities now, but in the 80s, she was a rocker ... with a twist. Her first band — a gothic/industrial/post-punk outfit called Killer Weasel — would set fire to things, hammer industrial refuse and cover the audience with (fake) blood. After rumors quickly spread that a few audience members had died at Killer Weasel's first show, in Michelson's words, "It was all good from there." In fact, Evan met her husband — a graphic artist, musician, composer and animator — while scavenging junk, looking for instruments for their respective industrial bands.

In the 90s, Evan moved on from post-punk to cyberpunk, followed by a straight-up fetish band that played dungeons and playgrounds. But her obsession with things melancholy and funereal began well before her musician days. Passionate about anatomical/medical antiques and artistic depictions of the extremes of human experience, she's infatuated with the point where "art melds with pain and ecstasy," not to mention the esthetics of grief.

Evan Michelson, for one, breaks for cemeteries.

As far as business goes, Evan attends markets and auctions weekly, earning her nicknames that include "Morticia Addams" and the "Death Lady." She is also an ethical vegetarian, a Victorian hairwork collector, an aesthete, and scholar-in-residence at the Morbid Anatomy Library, where she delivers regular lectures.

RYAN MATTHEW, BUYER

Ryan Matthew has been an avid collector since he was a child, starting with the items he found in the woods he grew up in and kept as relics. From there, he progressed to baseball cards, then horror-movie props, and finally into the type of collecting he is interested in now: Victorian taxidermy, skulls, skeletons and the early industrial lighting that fills his apartment.

As a young man, Ryan harbored a strong interest in the medical field, exploring human and animal structure through his extensive medical-related illustrations. The next step? Taxidermy, which he not only collected, but began to make himself, finding the skeletons of animals his dog "had previously maimed," cleaning and trying to re-articulate them. That, says Matthew, soon turned into "being given bags of exotic disarticulated skeletons and 'figuring' them out by studying the particular animal I was working on." His passion for osteology (the study of bones) as well as for Victorian taxidermy endures, and he has been known to buy human skulls (OK, at least one) off Craiglist, disassemble them, then re-articulate them as "exploded" (or Beauchene) skulls.

Today, as buyer for Obscura Antiques & Oddities, Ryan travels a lot, scouring flea markets, auctions, the Web and yard sales ... when people aren't just bringing him cool stuff to consider. His greatest find so far? Mr. Woofles, a Victorian taxidermied house dog in a museum case that he won at an auction after a long, rainy drive and an extended battle with fellow buyers. And, yes, he frequently buys an item for Obscura — a Victorian glass dome, for example — that he can't do without for his extensive personal collection.

Finally, Ryan's Holy Grail of Oddities? Perhaps something from the legendary Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities. "There was an amazing anthropomorphic diorama of taxidermy kittens having a tea party that I would most likely faint if given the chance to buy."

Wish him luck.