David Winton Bell Gallery

Event Details





Friday, February 26, 2016

Taxidermy, Art, and the Animal Question: A Symposium | Dead Animals, or the curious occurrence of taxidermy in contemporary art

7:30pm
List Art Auditorium

Rachel Poliquin


 Taxidermy and a Poetics of Strangeness


Rachel Poliquin will explore the cultural history of taxidermy from its earliest beginnings in sixteenth-century wonder cabinets to taxidermy’s unsettling reinvention in twenty-first century art.

Poliquin is a freelance writer and curator engaged in all things orderly and disorderly in the natural world. She is the author of The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing and Beaver, part of Reaktion Books’ Animal Series.  She has written for a variety of periodicals including The New York Times, Science Friday, and The Believer Magazine.  Her curatorial works includes “Ravishing Beasts: The Strangely Alluring World of Taxidermy” for the Museum of Vancouver and the permanent vertebrate exhibits for the Beaty Museum of Biodiversity. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.