Imagining Fauna 2008
Photography invites us to pay attention. It describes with economy, precision and detail. It enables us to stare, scrutinize, become voyeurs. Taxidermy allows us to do the same. Its complete replication of an animal’s stance, gesture and look provides us a way to study and comprehend its existence. Yet I find that these animals, often portrayed in suspended animation, seem simultaneously strange, ghostly and beautiful. Their gaze is both familiar and unknown. I intend this work to move beyond what is merely seen to the territory of the imagination, where what is remembered and known is transformed into something new.
Notes on my use of the ambrotype process:
Aging biological collections housed in science museums worldwide are facing a dilemma. Many specimens are deteriorating due, not only to the ravages of time wrought by display and storage, but also from the tactics employed to preserve these specimens in the first place. The fragility of an ambrotype’s glass substrate, coupled with the vagaries of this nineteenth-century printing process, appears to echo this visible evidence. The resultant objects seem an apt metaphor for our contemporary world, as nature and civilization struggle to find their proper balance for survival.
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Mary Frey was born in Yonkers, NY, USA in 1948. She received her MFA in photography from Yale University in 1979. Since then, she has been on the faculty of the Hartford Art School and is currently Professor of Photography. Frey received numerous awards for her work, most notably a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and two photography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980 and 1992. She was the recipient of a Te Foundation Fellowship in 2004. During the 1994-95 academic year Mary Frey was the Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith College, Northampton, MA and in the spring of 2001 she completed an artist’s residency at the Burren College of Art, County Clare, Ireland . Her work has been exhibited extensively and is part of many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Chicago Art Institute and the International Polaroid Collection. The bulk of Frey’s work addresses the nature of the documentary image in contemporary culture. She is currently working on a series of ambrotypes created from digital files. All of her projects can be viewed at www.maryfrey.com.
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