In modern cultures death is a taboo subject.
Everything that relates or reminds to it is often found morbid, bizarre and mystical. Taxidermy is such an example. My interest in taxidermy started with the quest to understand my own personal relation to the feeling of morbidity. I wanted to understand why someone would surround himself with hyperrealist animal carcasses and why I find this unsettling. Soon I realized that I am myself a collector of similar fetish. After all, photography and taxidermy do the same to their subjects: both freeze them in the moment preserving their existence eternally. Both are forms of representation that can be used to identify and typify a subject providing an everlasting memory and a proof of existence.
Taxidermy is a result of man’s craftsmanship which involves creative decisions about how to represent that animal. Its positioning and new environment can give it different meanings and interpretations. A museum object has a different significance than a hunter’s trophy, a fashion item or a deceased pet mounted in the living room. Because identity is formed by comparison, finding similarities and differences between ourselves and others, an embalmed animal also represents its owner providing an insight into his personality.
We look at images on a daily basis hardly ever thinking of them as an object related to mortality. The meaning in Freeze is not only at the level of the subject, it transcends to the depiction itself. The project reveals that photography is a visual equivalent to taxidermy, ‘freezing time’ – it is a mummifying, mysterious fetish object.