In her series Audubon Guide Presents and Wild Life, DeAnn Desilets creates still life landscapes and “food-scapes” using miniature animal figurines, playing on the dioramas of the natural history museums she visited in her youth. Beyond preserving animals as taxidermy behind glass, Desilets is interested in immortalizing the idea of animals in photographs in a quirky, whimsical manner all her own. The images in Audubon Guide Presents comment on the possibility of a world packed with animal life in a way we can only imagine today, due to human influence. In Wild Life, Desilets’s pictures use humor and subtlety to discuss sustainability and our dependency on our natural surroundings. Like work by Andrea Buzzichelli and Catherine Larré, the images’ scale adds a playful but also off-putting effect.

From the artist’s statement: As an artist, I have always been drawn to simple ideas with strong contexts. I look to express the human and environmental condition around us by making a connection through a shared experience. Inspiration comes in keeping my imagination and eyes open to what is in my surroundings. Childhood memories of running free in the woods and creating my own worlds have been staples through my entire body of work. Pulling from made up stories, known fairy tales and museum dioramas my work aims to create emotional connections that hearken back to the days of my youth. At that point in our lives the world is a pile of blank books where every emotion, reaction, experience is new and exciting. By revisiting these feelings in the world around us we can stop and pause to reflect on what may have been lost, and gain new perspective about where we are in our lives, our world, and our environment.

Visit artist's site: deann.fm

Found via: Lenscratch