Animals live in an ontological quagmire. When we look at them we see both the unknown of the wild and the potential for humanity. They are sources of food, companionship, and fear. In the current discourses of art, the animal is seen as a representation—a symbol of our cultural projections and anthropomorphisms surrounding our ideas of nature. As Steve Baker writes, “It is the animal … which more than anything else prompts a rethinking of what it is to be a human ‘subject’, and which points to the shortcomings of earlier philosophical accounts of the human.”1 In exploring the representation of the animal, my artwork seeks to place the viewer within the indeterminate ground between nature, culture and technology. To achieve these ends, I mediate images of animals and environments through the use of photography, digital cinema, and installation. An uncanny visual connection is made in Curiosities where viewers make eye contact with taxidurmied birds whose forms are flattened into color field monstrosities. The glass eyes return the viewers gaze with an alien inquisitiveness. In Bunny (Chimpanzee) and Tiger (Chimpanzee) juvenile chimpanzees are discovered in their environment clothed in animal costumes. The photographs ask the viewer to inquire into the cultural personifications imbued in our ideas of the animal and the human, as they observe these atrophied primates clad in children’s costumes.

It is a goal of my studio practice to inquire how technology distorts and mediates these relationships. These phenomena are rooted in perceptual experience, leading me to create work mediated by the techniques of special effects. Contrary to the popular notion, special effects are not reality simulations or surreal aberrations, rather they are visual mechanisms that expose political and ontological undercurrents of contemporary culture. The installation Prescribed Burn transforms the apocalyptic event of a forest fire into a revelatory visual experience. As the viewers lay on their backs on comfortable pillows and rugs, their view is encompassed by a forest fire projected on the ceiling. The conflagration is self-generating and never ending, leaving the audience perpetually on the threshold of ecological and visual collapse. When experiencing a visual effect we can glimpse Jamais Vu – from the French “never seen”- taking in the familiar and making it alien and unrecognized. This contextual erasure creates an opportunity for artistic intervention and the production of political meaning.