Animal Land

Animal Land reimagines traditional wildlife encounters in a contemporary format - through technology in an urban space with human inhabitants. Large format video projections generate synthetic animals, native to each location, that are completely decontextualized. Void of environment, sound, and color, they are activated only by electricity, light, and cityscape. Novel human/animal relationships are realized as man-made forms and sounds interrupt the projection, causing space shifts between resolution (physical sense) and sparking faded memories of true animal encounters (metaphysical sense). Both real and imaginary interactions with animals influence human perceptions of cohabitation vs. conflict, a dichotomy that ultimately determines the fate of native species, traditional habitats, and the uncertain results of synanthropic behavior as wild spaces decline in the expansion of civilization.

Collaborators, Lauren Strohacker and Kendra Sollars, are responding to nature on the verge of collapse due to the politicization and exploitation of land and wildlife management, and investigating a future where genuine interactions between humans and non-human animals may not exist. Quietly detached, Animal Land is a visual metaphor of this long, unfolding narrative that wavers between displacement, reintroduction and loss.

“Strohacker and Sollars’s collaboration is meant to confront in any number of registers, be they aesthetic, socio-political, environmental, etc. The Animal Land Project makes Strohacker and Sollars two of our best pictorial historians of animal presence as well as the present contradictions of our mutually shared life-world.” Grant Vetter, The Arts Beacon

Want to see where Animal Land has been so far? Check out the map on my current/upcoming page!

Animal Land is an ongoing project. See more videos here.