Alaska Brown Bear

Alaska Brown Bear. Chromogenic hand print. 4x4ft (122x122cm) & 18x18in (46x46cm)

Stuffed Histories
Nikolai Fine Art, New York
Hudson River Museum, New York
Rare Gallery, New York

Scope Maimi, Florida
PM Gallery & House, London
The Holden Gallery, Manchester
Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia


For more than nine decades the zoological dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History have acted as portals into the diminishing habitats of the natural world. These taxidermal showcases present life-size, three-dimensional simulations of geographical environments, containing rock formations, plants, and indigenous wildlife, that merge with painted backdrops amalgamating the two and three-dimensional into a seamless whole.

Each specimen holds its pose forever: a vision made possible only through death and literal re-presentation. Pictures of what was and is freeze temporal reality into a document of the virtual: the defining moment of the contact between man and animal.

Through the pseudo-immortalistic discipline of photography,
Stuffed Histories, large chromogenic colour prints, offer nostalgic cameos that reinterpret the natural artifice of museum display. Hyper-real saturations of colour and light illuminate each biological cartoon examining the authenticity of the real and the ideal, the actual and the illusion. Instrumental in the initial assembly of the dioramas, the photographer once again ventures out into 'the field', this time from the darkness of museum halls to record these stolen moments: iconic records of a lost narrative.

30 Chromogenic hand prints. 4x4 ft (122x122 cm) & 18x18 in (46x46 cm). 1994-2004


Bantings
Moa    
Zebras Savannah    
Wallrus Albatross    
Ostriches Gemsboxs    
Wetlands Snow Goose    
Cheetahs


Mandrill


   
Stuffed Histories 2 - 13. Chromogenic hand prints. 4x4 ft (122x122 cm) & 24x24 in (61x61 cm). 1994-2004

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New York Times, December 1999

Wall Street International Magazine. November 2013

Design Week UK 2013

The Huffington Post. November 2013

Absolute Arts "Animal Artifice"

Telfair Museum Of Art, Georgia, USA 2017

The Holden Gallery, Manchester School of Art, UK 2014

Adams, Nicholas. 'Karl Grimes - Stuffed Histories' . Source, Issue no 23, 2000. pp.23-29.

New York Contemporary Art Report. June/July 1999, p.67


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