Jennifer Steensma Hoag // Broken Models
Broken Models
In 2015 I negotiated access to photograph dioramas in various stages of being decommissioned. Using these fictional spaces to create imaginary scenes of my own, I introduced a worker wearing a white Hazmat suit, making notes of his observations.
Rachel Poliquin, in her book The Breathless Zoo, writes that “Taxidermy is deeply marked by human longing,” revealing our hopes and dreams about our place in the natural world. Broken Models refers to the deteriorating dioramas I photographed and our failed construct of the environment as one of inexhaustible resources and the resiliency to accommodate, unchanged to our abuses.