Animals Inhabit Fashion Ads, 2017

Digital Inkjet Prints

I have an ongoing fascination with the ways in which humans refer to, relate with, represent, fear and revere animals.  A large part of my work concentrates upon mediated settings in which animals are regularly positioned in postures which portray them in reductive and prescribed roles as wild, other, exotic, and ultimately complicit with their status as bound objects.  To date, three projects address these ideas.

This first series attempts to disrupt some of the ways animals are marginalized and relegated to prop status in the advertisements. Working with appropriated and original material my process utilized re-photography and digital montage to allow animals to enter, inhabit and animate the “landscape” of advertisement pages and to interact with the humans and animals presented within them. While the approach may be seen as playful, its goal is to suggest critical interrogation of embedded meaning and illuminate antagonisms associated with the interplay of humans and animals.