.

Meandering through archived materials stored in natural history collections including

glass slides, taxidermy, preserved animals, and minerals, Extant Eorions poises the natural

history museum as a prism through which we refract our human understandings of nature,

land, and time. I examine the natural history institution as an important space for the general

public to remember extinct and extant life, but also an insufficient and even perverse gesture

to “save”.

This exhibition and accompanying artist book spans three modes of working. In the

first, I construct still life photographs with taxidermy and animal specimens housed in museum

collections. To make these 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.

Secondly, I scanned and reworked a collection of glass lantern slides that are housed in

the geology collection at the University of New Mexico and were used by Prof. Stuart A.

Northrop to teach geology and paleontology 100 years ago. They are lost to time and none of

the current faculty know anything about them. I scanned the collection, re-fabricated them as

larger, 8x10 glass slides, and displayed them on a custom 3x6 ft light table that I built, as well

as in light boxes on the wall.

In my third mode of working, I talk back to the slide collection by adding images from

my own personal photo archive to the 8x10 glass slides. This method engages with Dr. Nancy

Marie Mithlo’s “talking back methodology” wherein Native artists are disrupting institutional

archives by remixing the archive’s materials. The personal images I added to the slides include

pictures of reptiles and amphibians made by my biologist dad and I over the last 30 years.

I exhibit this work in custom frames and install the framed prints on top of photo wallpapers.

The function of the wallpapers is to engulf the audience in a particular environment and turn

the gallery into a suggestion of a diorama, which implicates the audience as the diorama’s

subjects.

In the book, the images are paired with text collected from many biologists and

ecologists writing about extinction, the changing environment, and the future. Together, the

disparate writers create a vaguely united, institutional voice discussing the qualities and

phenomena of our deteriorating ecosystems. The scans of the glass slides are printed on

narrow vellum sheets so that they retain their translucent quality within the book. The book

was designed by Nicole Lavelle to evoke the form of mid-century field guides and technical

manuals.

Together, the still life photographs, backlit slides, and wallpapers leap across time,

asking us to consider how animal preservation, dioramas, and photo documentation shape our

perception of the natural world. Through witnessing, capturing, cataloging, and preserving, we

wrestle with describing nature—first to create meaning, and now to remember what we are

rapidly losing. Both in terms of large format film photography and natural history collections,

this work is about things slipping away and our gestures to hold on.