The Specimen and Spectacle at Southeast Missouri University
SHOW STATEMENT
Natural history institutions embody a contradiction: they preserve the past while reinforcing the systems of control that shaped it. I have spent years inside these places, drawn to their collections, genuinely moved by what they hold. But they are also part of the problem. They document the very histories of exploitation they helped sustain.
Bears are the clearest case. Shot for science, trained for spectacle, stuffed and posed to look natural in dioramas designed to look wild. Once sovereign, now specimen. The Specimen and Spectacle examines how bears have been collected, displayed, and mythologized — how the institutions that claim to preserve them have also participated in their displacement.
The works in this exhibition draw on archival imagery from naturalists, circus documentation, and taxidermy traditions, layering these sources with original pen and ink drawings and digital intervention. Figures from William Tait and John James Audubon appear alongside circus props and museum mounts. The result is a body of work that asks what we choose to preserve, and at what cost — and whether preservation itself can become another form of control.
The Specimen and Spectacle was exhibited at the Wolz Ruzicka Gallery, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, May 2–31, 2025.
Bears are the clearest case. Shot for science, trained for spectacle, stuffed and posed to look natural in dioramas designed to look wild. Once sovereign, now specimen. The Specimen and Spectacle examines how bears have been collected, displayed, and mythologized — how the institutions that claim to preserve them have also participated in their displacement.
The works in this exhibition draw on archival imagery from naturalists, circus documentation, and taxidermy traditions, layering these sources with original pen and ink drawings and digital intervention. Figures from William Tait and John James Audubon appear alongside circus props and museum mounts. The result is a body of work that asks what we choose to preserve, and at what cost — and whether preservation itself can become another form of control.
The Specimen and Spectacle was exhibited at the Wolz Ruzicka Gallery, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, May 2–31, 2025.
