In "Glass Eyes Stare Back", I nod toward the precarity of our damaged ecosystems and my fears about environmental catastrophe by looking closely at the eerie magnetism of preserved animals. To make my images, I position specimens and printed backdrops before my camera to construct still life tableaus that I call fictional habitat dioramas. Some of the backdrops contain imagery of wildfire-smoke-filled skies or Hudson River School paintings that romanticize and fictionalize the landscape. These images demonstrate not only my fear about our environmental futures, but also a sense of sublime awe about the mystery of what’s to come.
My pictures argue that animals preserved for science occupy a third space between life and death—neither alive nor gone, but still functional and serving a purpose. A second life in a museum hall is much longer than the first. Taxidermy is an antiquated method in which an animal is stuffed and posed to perform itself. Animal specimens in research collections, on the other hand, gesture toward the future. Biologists actively collect, process, and catalog species and store them in archival facilities to use in studies that will ideally—hopefully—help answer some of the existential questions we face about the future of biodiversity.
Like photography, animal preservation distorts time and creates an approximate experience. Collections in natural history museums and research facilities speak to our human desire to draw nature closer and to create encounters with animals. From our awkward place existing both within and outside of the natural world, we long to be connected with the things we are destroying. The fact that the animal must die in order for us to learn from it and witness it in proximity is a twisted irony. With my camera, I seek to fulfill my urge to witness nature in proximity, as well as question my desire for that proximity. Both in terms of large format film photography and animal specimens, this work is about things slipping away and our gestures to hold on.
