Vanitas Painting

This is a series of oil paintings on small (12"x12") wooden boards. I worked from real specimens of taxidermied song birds from the ornithology lab at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. The dead birds are pinned to the wall. Tags hang from their bound feet, do not give information about the bird or the species. The image references historical crucifixes along contemporary obsessions with collecting, categorizing and displaying objects. My fascination with detail and realism marries with abstraction in through elements repetition and the artifice of display. I am intrigued by the relationship of individual and collective identities, and the contemporary explosion of marketing and objectifying the self.