The Post-Natural History Museum , 2005
Installation with cut outs, sharpie marker, minature dioramas, and pinhole photographs
Lawrence Alloway Memorial Gallery, Stony Brook, NY.
The Post-Natural History Museum is a critical installation concerning how nature is depicted in natural history dioramas. Pinhole photographs and miniature dioramas make up an alternative, more contemporary, version of “the natural;” they include factory farms, GMOs, mythical beasts, and ecological nightmare logic. The pinhole photographs are taken from The American Museum of Natural History in New York City and often look as fantastic as the dioramas. A audio tour containing snippets of converstaions from visitors to the American Museum of Natural history and lectures on natural history accompanied the exhibit. Snippets of “it’s so cute!” and “look at the bunny, baby!” are intermingled with taxonomic explanations and natural history lectures. Overall, the installation juxtaposes competing and contradictory notions of nature.
Max Liboiron 