Peter Smuts
Born 1966, Pittsburgh, PA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Preservation VI, 2003, light jet C-print mounted between aluminum and UV Plexiglas, 36” x 54”, Lent by the Artist
For the Preservation series, Peter Smuts photographed small toy animals suspended in liquid and trapped in mason jars. These tantalizing pictures tempt us with their commercial candy colored saturation while the “animals” within the glass beseech us with their confrontational gaze. With Preservation, a body of work that explores human conceptions of nature and perception, Smuts creates ambiguity within the image.
Smuts was inspired to question traditional constructions of the environment in nature photography which often seemed romanticized and falsified. He soon discovered that using toys as proxies better conveyed his message than the real animals that they represent. The toy animals can appear so real that the viewer is at first shocked to see a zebra in a mason jar, but, on closer examination, tiny air bubbles that cling to the plastic figurines expose the artifice. In fact, once the fabrication becomes apparent, the toys reveal themselves as simplistic abstractions of the more complex living beings. The large-format of the prints gives these children’s toys monumental status, accentuating their ambiguous nature and questioning how we see, understand, and play with the wild kingdom.
