Have you already seen Karen Knorr's photographs from her Fable series.  If not, you should because they are remarkably beautiful, crisp, and haunting.  Here is a little sampling.

Her photographs use taxidermy as well as live animals, analog photography as well as some digital remixing, which gives the scenes an unreal hybrid sort of reality.  From here Knorr's website:

"The usual aim of the fable is to teach a lesson by drawing attention to animal behaviour and its relationship to human actions and shortcomings. Animals in fables speak metaphorically of human folly, criticizing human nature. Yet it seems that the nature of Karen Knorr’s work has another aim. In  Knorr’s  “Fables”  the animals are not dressed up to resemble humans nor do they illustrate any explicit  moral. Liberated, they roam freely in human territory  drawing attenton to  the unbridged gap between nature and culture.

To see more of Knorr's photographs, visit her website at http://www.karenknorr.com/photographs/fables/

Trigger rides again!  Read Melissa Milgrom's article in Salon.com about the recent auction of Roy Roger's iconic horse, Trigger, and various other Roger memorabilia.  Click here +

 Also make sure to check out Milgrom's new book - Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy published by Houghton Mifflin earlier this year.

NAME: S. R Plant
AGE: 54
OCCUPATION: Dilettante
LOCATION: Burgundy, France
NUMBER OF TAXIDERMY PIECES: Over 50
FAVOURITE PIECE: Pink-backed Pelican (Pelicanus rufescens)

What was your very first piece of taxidermy?  A Common Guillemot (Uria aalge). I had to leave it behind (along with 93 assorted South American birds – all study specimens) when I left Ireland, somewhat hastily, 20 years ago. I still haven't come to terms with the loss.

Where do you find pieces for your collection? Junk shops, garage sales. I'm also given pieces by friends. The only creature I've had mounted by a taxidermist is a Néné (Branta sandvicensis) I found dead in a bird park.

Where do you display your taxidermy?  Just about everywhere.

How or when did you become interested in taxidermy? I was brought up in the heart of an industrial city in the Midlands of England where the most mundane of wildlife seemed exotic. Natural history books and the local museum with its diorama of British fauna were sources of fascination for me. In a way my house has become a natural history museum in which I am one of the exhibits (I'm the one with a pulse).

What do you think taxidermy is? Art? Souvenir? Nature? Kitsch?  All four, but mostly 'souvenir' – a constant reminder of the extraordinary.

Do any pieces have names? Only common and Linnaean.

Have you ever prepared a taxidermy mount?  Not to completion; I once skinned a badger but used the wrong chemicals to cure the skin, causing the pelt to irreversably harden when inside-out – you could still stroke the fur, but only by inserting your hand into the animal's rear opening. I wrote a play centering on this incident, called 'Buridan's Ass', which explored the mental geography of a failed taxidermist – his doomed relationships, his weak grasp of reality. It is not autobiographical, far from it, absolutely not.

Do you worry about displaying so much death... that is, do you ever get negative reactions to your collection?  For some reason I don't associate mounted animals with death, though I do have two gorilla skulls with which I am uncomfortable - I have been unable to find a suitablely 'respectful' way to display them. If these anthropomorphic notions persist I will end up picketing my own home. And yes, I do sometimes get negative reactions, but, tellingly, never from children.

Why do you think taxidermy is back in fashion?  Because it was out of fashion for a while. I don't know why but this time around people seem to be under the impression that there is irony involved.

If you were reincarnated as an animal, what would you be and why?  A gorilla, that way after I was dead I could make someone like me feel uncomfortable.

What is beastly love?  If you would like to know more or have your taxidermic passions featured here, please click here +

 

 

I love this! Elaine Bradford combines her love of crochet and taxidermy to tenderly spooky dioramic effect.  Her show at the Art League Houston in Houston, Texas, last spring (January 9 - February 20, 2009) contained a series of dioramas inhabited by taxidermied animals in woolly disguises.

The video is a bit blurry, so here are also some images posted on Flickr by Mr. Kimberly:

Love it.  Each of her beasts were accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek natural history description. Check out more images of the exhibition on flickr here + (where I copied these images from) and Elaine Bradford's other crochedermy here +

 

 

An amazing artist I`ve just stumbled upon: Nicolas Lamas.  I'll be posting a more complete view of the amazing photographs of Nicolas Lamas in the next few days, but here is a brief preview:

 

Over the last six weeks or so, I've been working at the soon-to-be-fully-open Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  The museum is unusual in that it both houses the research collections of UBC's various biological faculties while also opening those same collections up to the public.  Visitors have the opportunity to look into the actual storage units and meander through the maze of cabinets housing 500,000 specimens of plants, algae, fungi and the like, 600,000 specimens of bugs, beatles, and butterflies, more shells that you could count, 40,000 specimens of land vertebrates, 800,000 fish specimens, and over 20,000 fossils from around the world. 

The highlight of the collections until the museum opens (and probably afterwards too) is a beautifully articulated skeleton of an enormous - and I mean ENORMOUS - blue whale that hangs in the atrium of the museum's entrance.          

So what have I been doing?  Something far less impressive than that whale.  You see those little windows down below?  Well, I've been making sure that what's inside is worth the look.  Those windows are scattered through out the museum (which extends in rows and rows and rows of cabinets behind) are little windows into the beauties, oddities, rhythms, and ruptures that make up the diversity and balance of the natural world around us.  Unfortunately the window reflection makes picture-taking difficult.  Mine didn't turn out nearly as nice as these photographs by Dean Chura and posted on flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanchura-earthboundphotographer/sets/72157624132018828/

 

The museum will be hosting a series of free previews with talks and tours throughout the summer, so if you are in Vancouver, be sure to check it out.  The entire museum will be open in the fall.  Find out all the details of preview events here + http://www.beatymuseum.ubc.ca/visitors.html 

  

Check out Magenta Magazine's interview with Morgan Mavis - curator of Toronto's rather unique Contemporary Zoological Conservatory at 

http://www.magentamagazine.com/3/features/contemporary-zoological-conservatory

The CZC was also recently featured in a photo shot with author Yann Martel whose latest book, as you may or not already known, discusses taxidermy and the holocaust.  hmm.. 

 

 

See more of Cavalieri's work here + http://cavaglass.com/gallery/1.SCULPTUREelizA.htm

Check out Melissa Milgrom's article in the Daily Beast "Cool, Dead, and Stuffed." 

"How did taxidermy become so hip? Melissa Milgrom on why the Victorian fascination with stuffing animals has become the hot new thing among hipsters and urbanites.

Sitting in Observatory, an art galley and events space in the newly hip Gowanus section of Brooklyn, Joanna Ebenstein clicked JPEGs of taxidermy that she has traveled the world to photograph. Her passion for the preserved is as far from country-kitsch as the toxic Gowanus is from the meandering Mississippi. “Taxidermy is more acceptable now. It’s the embarrassing thing in the basement, but now it’s cool.”

For Ebenstein and a growing number of urban enthusiasts, taxidermy is more than just a stuffed animal; it’s an experience, the tactile opposite of a world that communicates in bits and bytes. “It is a deeply intimate encounter,” explains Rachel Poliquin, curator and scholar, whose taxidermy blog Ravishing Beasts began as a post-doctoral project; now it gets around 800 hits a day. Last month, Poliquin curated a taxidermy exhibit at the Vancouver Museum; wildly popular, the exhibit aroused deep empathy for animals in a city the museum thought would balk at the show.

But you knew all of that already, if you're already reading this. Read the whole article at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-11/cool-dead-and-stuffed/?cid=topic:mainpromo1