read about this series
De Anima: 2009, Photographs (Printed on fine art archival paper),
Size: 26“h x 28“w
Artist Statement
This series explores the place of animals in our cultural and social imaginings in the twenty-first century. The figure of the animal has long played a significant role in human societies as an allegory of our relation to each other as well as to the earth. If the animal looms especially large in our thoughts today—an increasingly important subject in philosophy, cultural theory, and art—it is because it represents both the damage we have inflicted on the environment and our inability to understand our relationship to the natural world. It is the end of our connection to the animal on which we seem to be meditating, a connection that we are desperate to understand more fully, having only ever grasped it incompletely, incorrectly, or in fragments and scraps in the first place.
These pieces explore the alterity and familiarity of the animal. My hope is to trouble both our too easy assimilation of the animal to human modes and models of understanding and the equally problematic concession of the animal to an incommensurability that can never be broached.
Lying entangled in the roots of the word ‘animal’ are the concepts of life, breath, and soul—everything that is fundamental to existence. For Aristotle, the soul (de anima) was not a thing that divided the human from plants or animals, but the name for a lifeforce that was part of every living thing. These pieces enact this idea of anima: life as a shared property of different bodies that exist in common in the increasingly fragile space we inhabit together.