Wildlife

Wildlife addresses three historic taxidermy collections still on display in the city of Banff, Alberta: The Banff Park Museum, the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum, and the Banff Indian Trading Post souvenir shop. These collections share a common goal of presenting an idealized and romanticized notions of "nature" and "the wild" thus fulfilling tourist desires; however, each has its own agenda in terms of how the artifacts function and what purpose they serve.

The museums are all essentially anachronistic with the Banff Park Museum functioning as a "museum of a museum" presenting a natural history display as it originally appeared 1915; the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum displays a history of the indigenous people of the area as told through a mixture of traditionally garbed mannequins and taxidermy animals dating back to the 1950s; and the Indian Trading Post souvenir shop which originated at the turn of the century is pure spectacle with sagittally severed animal specimens stuck to the wall, and a composite specimen misleadingly labelled as a "The Merman".

The images in the series are of the specimens themselves and printed as cyanotypes in order to evoke a sense of being from a past era. Yet, certain details and slippages complicate these images and their subjects remain in a mixture of present and past, live and dead, idealized and real.