The purpose of a taxidermist is to give live appearance to a dead animal. To achieve this, he erases all traces of death, to hide to the viewer’s eye everything that might be unpleasant or that shatters the illusion of seeing an animal that, as if by magic, has been frozen in motion. In “Taxidermy”, viewers access images through a hole that guides their look. This peephole deliberately hides the rest of the scene to focus their attention on certain details that try to undo the steps followed by the taxidermist. This “Taxidermy in reverse” wants to investigate the thin line between animate matter and dead material. With the same attention to detail as the artist, “Taxidermy” retraces the path to reflect on the contradiction of trying to breathe life into a corpse: An attempt that seems to reveal certain truths about our condition.
I’m not sure how I feel about this work (although, if it were my project, this is how I would have edited it, minus, perhaps, the last image, but I think it’s just a nice picture).
I’ll be posting another body of her work in the near future.
From “Taxidermia”
Visit artist's site: cynthianudel.com
Posted September 3rd, 2012
