Dioramas and Hybridity:
Stories and Concepts of Nature

Abstract:

This paper illustrates how my artwork from 2005-2006 has dealt with different popular concepts of nature and what gets to count as “natural.” Starting with the visual and social trope of the natural history diorama as a socially loaded depiction of nature, different attitudes and concepts of nature can be traced through visual depictions.  Because of the explicit intertwining of nature and the words, images, and narratives we use to engage it with (both physically and conceptually), I use my artwork to posit nature as local place that necessarily includes humans, technology, social norms and culture, narratives, human-made elements, economies, organic beings, and most importantly, the interactions between them.

This is dealt with in different ways in different pieces and exhibits. All of the pieces discussed in this paper have been shown in the MFA Thesis Exhibition 2006 in the University Art Gallery in the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University. Two of these pieces critique a cultureless and “objective” nature: Dirty Taxidermy illustrates the humorous, disturbing, and oddly detached sexual actions of several “nature lovers;” and Abundance, a walk-in diorama that critiques early, though still prevalent, depictions of nature as resource-rich and unspoiled, guided by narratives of reproduction and a desire for plenitude. Other pieces focus on the viewer as an essential part of his or her local ecosystem; Art on the Barge, Nature on the Banks, an installation originally shown at Fire Island and shown at the Staller Gallery as Eco-system, is a participant-dependent model of ecology based on economic choices. Three of my latest works construct alternative narratives of nature. Experiments with Plants is a collographic print series showing an alternative scientific research method by reframing relationships between laboratory technicians and plants. New Stories Aurora Borealis and the Melting Tundra is an installation with an educational and activist component dealing with climate change in northern Canada, and its complimentary digital print series, Transition (Bear), deals explicitly with hybridity and brings together the cultural and “the natural” in a violent, creative, collaborative merging.

Throughout the artwork and discussion of “nature,” hybridity as the combining of social and physical contexts is important.  I use theorists such as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, William Cronon, and Kathryn Hales as advocates of hybridity in terms of nature, and I look at how other artists use nature and hybridity in their work, including Patricia Johanson, Agnes Denes, and Erik Edson.

2006

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