MUSEUM OF SILENCE
By Melita Dahl
Artist's Statement: This series expresses my concern for endangered animal species. Through our relatively short history of development, Australians have become one of the most highly urbanised populations on earth. We live on the edge of a continent whose landscape has been radically altered and many of its natural systems have been destroyed or polluted. From within our urban settlements we now relate to and experience nature at an ever increasing degree of distance and abstraction. We experience wildlife through photographs, the wildlife documentary or in Museums and Zoos. The natural environment in these contexts has been ordered and tamed. My images have come out of a collection of preserved native animals in the Australian Museum in Sydney. The way in which animals are presented evokes a sense of the spiritual distance that separates us from our fellow species in the present day. They are long dead and dust covered, locked away in glass cabinets and stored in a monumental building deep within the city. Taxidermy is used as a metaphor for our lack of awareness of the needs of our fellow species. It is possible to draw similarities between taxidermy and photography, for instance both strive to achieve some semblance of life. If we continue to put other species at risk the earth will suffer a great loss. We cannot expect these records to last eternally; they too will fade with time.
About the Artist Melita
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Melita was born in Australia in 1966 and graduated from the Canberra School of Art, Canberra, ACT in 1991 where she majored in photomedia. Melita now lives in Germany, and has studied at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, since 1997. Melita has exhibited her photographic works within Australia in group and solo exhibitions since 1991, and more recently, video works have been screened in Europe. Her photographic work can be found in Australian public and private art collections. "Museum of Silence", 1991, are manipulated images taken at the Australian Museum in Sydney from their collection of preserved native animals. This work uses taxidermy as a metaphor for the lack of awareness of the needs of animals, and draws on the similarities between taxidermy and photography. "Biohazard" 1993, was conceived as a joint project and grew out of a shared concern about land degradation by recreating an atmosphere of a degraded environment, and by showing the fragile and fading nature of other animal species. |
[Above] Photo of Melita Dahl by Melita Dahl, 2002.
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Thylazine No.3 (March, 2001) |
