AFTERLIVES

Solo Exhibition at Lillstreet Art Center & Gallery, April 2019

Natural history collections reveal the ghostly past lives of urban environments: organisms now absent from the landscape live on as objects of research, tangible traces of certain times and places. So little remains—walking through the museum, we struggle to connect past and present worlds.

Engaging with the traditions of museum practice and scientific illustration, this work asks what natural history specimens can show us about our everyday surroundings, and what is obscured or altogether lost.

Each piece starts with a specific specimen housed in one of Chicago’s scientific institutions. These images reconstruct the story of each object through its accompanying data, research into the species, and detailed observation of its material condition.