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| Past Exhibitions |
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Eyes on Collections
Chicago–based artist Terry Evans has, since 1998, been photographing specimens from natural history museum collections (especially the Field Museum in Chicago and the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.) that relate to prairie life and the changes to that environment over time. The photographs presented in this exhibition explore the process of collection preparation, serving as, in Evans’s words, “a kind of homage to the plants and creatures collected and to the collectors themselves.”
Special acknowledgments are due to Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica; Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica; and Dr. Ángel Valdés, Associate Curator of Malacology, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. |
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This exhibition features photographs by artists Terry Evans and Laszlo Layton, who use natural history museum specimens as subjects in their work. It is presented in conjunction with two concurrent exhibitions on Level 1: Sonic Scenery: Music for Collections (February 3 to August 3, 2006) and the newly restored dioramas in the halls of African Mammals and North American Mammals. Like these other exhibitions, Eyes on Collections is intended to focus attention on a particular aspect of the Museum’s collections–in this case, on how specimens are collected, identified, cataloged, preserved, and presented for display.
Laszlo Layton, a longtime Los Angeles resident, has selected many of his subjects from the Museum’s Mammalogy, Malacology, and Crustacea collections. In the two series of photographs represented here–Cabinet of Curiosities (2004) and Pictorial Zoology (2005)–Layton combines early photographic processes with soft focus and hand-coloring in order to suggest traditional natural history book illustrations. Among his images of taxidermy birds and mammals are examples of exotic and endangered species as well as more familiar animals commonly found in North America.