Taxidermy Isn’t Boring
Kelly McCallum’s post modern taxidermy attempts have mastered how things age and how their essence can be recaptured and their meaning altered.
On a basic level, taxidermy is essentially an art of re-contextualizing animals — generally those which we have all come into contact with whilst they were moving, breathing and in possession of a beating heart — into an environment we would not generally expect to encounter them. Taxidermy attempts to conserve the “life” of these animals by retaining a realistic/probable posture as appropriate; flying, running, growling… The animal is presented in a manner which causes a physical reaction by the viewer while itself remaining completely unmotivated by internal life. What is inside remains hollow and plastic. The way that a piece of taxidermy on the wall becomes a formal version of it’s own previous body: genderless, lifeless, passive and devoid of psychological importance, the same could be said about architecture. A room denies the human body in that we assume that the human is the user and therefore the room is pre-existent and the objects inside of it autonomous. I’m fascinated by the way that such a literal representation of an animal can not only be considered art, but art which alters one’s perception of the room that they are in. The inside becomes the outside, the animal’s lifeless shell representing what once was.
-Rachel
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