Mary Frey

Imagining Fauna

December 3, 2009 - January 3, 2010

Monkeys, squirrels, porcupines, pigeons.  For her series, Imagining Fauna, Mary Frey digitally photographs aging museum collections and prints each image on blackened glass using a wet-plate process popular in the nineteenth century.  The final pieces, called ambrotypes, offer evocative glimpses of long-ago taxidermied animals, still frozen in life-like poses. Yet the detail in Frey’s work demonstrates the fragility of such biological specimens, subject to inherent deterioration from the ways in which they were preserved and stored.  For Frey, the pieces themselves represent this tension, “an apt metaphor for our contemporary world, as nature and civilization struggle to find their proper balance for survival.”