PRIZED

With photographs, video, lightbox dioramas, and installation (of fur made from the bodies of once-alive Beaver, Seal, Mink, Rabbit, Raccoon, Elk, and Fox), this multi-disciplinary exhibition is an exploration into evidence and contradiction: beings and bodies, discarded histories, what survives, has worth, and needs recognition.

Inspired by a found set of Kodachrome stereo slides blasting colors from a 50s family and their luxurious travels around the globe, with taffeta, furs, daughters, weddings, parties. And Glass Lantern Slides from 1905, of hunters and their kill by ‘Travelogue’ creator, Burton Holmes. Image, video, and sculptural matter are meant to evoke dissonance and twist meaning; the use of collected material transformed into symbols and signals of the individual and the body. Abandoned archives call into question what endures, complexity of survival, invisible cruelties, sources of worth, and the inertia of status quo.

Connections emerge between the two image sets: fur-clad women wearing animal bodies as fashion, and the animal bodies lying dead at the hunters’ feet, killed for leisure, trophies, and consumption. Working with the slides prompted my collecting of vernacular photographs of women wearing furs. Which led to seeking physical fur coats—vintage furs—with the impossible goal of confiscation, to prevent the wearing, commerce, or potential resurgence of wearing fur. I became an ebay-hunter-fur-trapper, now with 33 (and counting) coats and wraps made from pelts of hundreds and hundreds of animal bodies.

Their life. Their warmth. Furs are an object of contradiction: through vanity's lens they are a luxurious object of desire, status, and wealth, and through a lens of compassion they are an embodiment of cruelty, death, and disgust. They are susceptible to becoming rotten. They are an object rooted in human evolutionary history. They embody desire, brutality, glamour, treasure, worth, femininity, sexuality, objectification, heirloom, status, attraction, power, cruelty, gore, death, violence, aversion, outdatedness, desperation, colonialist thinking, human-centric patriarchal capitalism. They are evidence of a life.