I was reading a book review in the New York Times about a middle-aged woman consumed by the world's troubles when I came upon this sentence, "Her dreams are full of animals she cannot save." This sentence describes my current quarantine project: I print images of endangered animals from the digital collection of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and then re-photograph them in still lives created with related household objects. I make connections between animals and objects but also with my own childhood memories of games and treasure maps. Everyday another animal seems to be added to the list of endangered species – rhinos, tigers, polar bears...and on and on. Declining biodiversity is made surreal and stark as I photograph animals that no longer exist, whose existence is perilous, or who in some cases never existed at all except in the imagination.
