Photographer Gregory Elms’ exhibition Preserved is an exploration of the wonder of childhood and the coinciding desire to capture the ephemeral. The images are large format prints featuring taxidermied fauna, all shot in bright light with opaque blackness their frame – the use of a film scanner allows for infinite image fidelity and the effect is reminiscent of a camera obscura.
Elms’ unconventional childhood – growing up in a suburban hotel, the public bar replete with taxidermied animals – is revealed at Edmund Pearce Gallery. The immensity and depth of the pictures reveals childlike morbidity; displaying various breeds of animal (for example: African Lioness, Red Fox, Sulphur Crested Cockatoo) side-by-side lends an air of the menagerie to the overall collection, recapitulating the dichotomy of the childlike and the gothic that is the paramount theme of the exhibition.
The medium of photography places a barrier between the viewer and the wild animal depicted. Everyone has experienced that particular mixture of wonderment, revulsion and fear when viewing (particularly large-scale) taxidermy in the ‘flesh’ but Preserved removes the element of instinctual fear, and according to the curator, Simon Gregg, erects both a physical and a psychological barrier between the viewer and the work that is very much evident when viewing the collection. Remove the fear and a quiet pathos takes its place.
Taxidermy and art have been popular bedfellows for at least the last two decades, and one might think that the interest in Memento Mori art had reached its climax and petered out. Gregory Elms’ work, through the sound use of film scanners and artificial light, negates this thought. Preserved is an excellent collection and raises interesting questions regarding zoology, ecology, death and the Gothic.
All works are for sale and are priced between $1200 and $4800.
Gregory Elms’ Preserved
Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne
7 – 24 November
