From a bottle-toting fox to albino squirrels, a provocative, disturbing and sometimes humorous series presents tableaux created from animal parts converted long ago into household trophies. The photographs and diorama raise questions about our culture’s use of animals as souvenirs, trophies or memento mori, evoking not only the animals’ ghosts, but the ghosts of those who owned them. Whether or not these photographs are subversive, bearing witness to our objectification of nature, not to promote the sacred but to profane the spirits of the world’s dwindling species, is up to the viewer.
Note: The original taxidermy pieces used in my constructions range from sixty years to over a century old. The albino squirrels were photographed in their dioramas just as they were placed long ago, and located in a Wisconsin funeral home.