stuffed
histories
Nikolai Fine Art,
New York
Hudson River Museum,
New York
Rare Gallery, New York
For more than six decades the zoological dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History have acted as portals into the diminishing habitats of the natural world. These taxidermal showcases present life-size, three-dimensional simulations of geographical environments, containing rock formations, plants, and indigenous wildlife, that merge with painted backdrops amalgamating the two and three-dimensional into a seamless whole.
Each specimen holds its pose forever: a vision made possible only through death and literal re-presentation. Pictures of what was and is freeze temporal reality into a document of the virtual: the defining moment of the contact between man and animal.
Through the pseudo-immortalistic discipline of photography, Stuffed Histories, large chromogenic colour prints, offer nostalgic cameos that reinterpret the natural artifice of museum display. Hyper-real saturations of colour and light illuminate each biological cartoon examining the authenticity of the real and the ideal, the actual and the illusion. Instrumental in the initial assembly of the dioramas, the photographer once again ventures out into 'the field', this time from the darkness of museum halls to record these stolen moments: iconic records of a lost narrative.
Chromogenic prints. 4 ft x 4 ft (122 x 122 cm) & 18 x 18 in (46 x 46 cm). 1994-1998
© Karl Grimes
