I wonder if the relationship we as humans share with animals and nature is genuine, authentic, real enough. For four years beginning in 2013, I visited natural history museums, zoos, and other places where visitors can experience captive and preserved animals in over half the states across the US while thinking about whether our interactions with animals and nature are sincere and substantial or artificial and contrived.

As humans in a fast-paced, overwhelmingly digital existence, we seek a connection with animals and the natural world in order to feel whole. So many of our interactions feel limited, as we are always at a bit of a distance from our non-human animal counterparts and the physicality of our planet. The visitor's experience of animals and nature at zoos, museums, and other like places is curated, controlled, dulled down or played up. My photographs highlight the divide between humans and "the wild," and the various ways in which the wild is experienced today.

In the bodies of work, Another Death and Glass Eyes Staring Yonder, I use photography to contemplate the cultural role of taxidermy and the meaning of this form of looking at animals after their death. By capturing the bizarre representation of animals, although already dead, in the throes of death and taxidermy pieces in their museum dioramas "looking out" into fantastically painted backgrounds, I question the purpose of both creating taxidermy and photographing it. Photographing a taxidermy piece created to represent a dead animal (a twice removal, a version of a version of a creature or a scene) and calling attention to the physical boundaries of a diorama that was intended to be an illusion symbolize the distant, limited experience we have of animals today.

A shift is beginning to take place as young people visiting educational institutions find virtual representations and interactive screens more engaging than traditional displays such as taxidermy and dioramas. The death, despondence, and sense of removal and foreboding in my photographs reflect on these same qualities on the subject of taxidermy's future in a changing world, a world in which what is considered a "real" experience with animals is certainly transforming.

In the bodies of work, Another Death and Glass Eyes Staring Yonder, I use photography to contemplate the cultural role of taxidermy and the meaning of this form of looking at animals after their death. By capturing the bizarre representation of animals, although already dead, in the throes of death and taxidermy pieces in their museum dioramas "looking out" into fantastically painted backgrounds, I question the purpose of both creating taxidermy and photographing it. Photographing a taxidermy piece created to represent a dead animal (a twice removal, a version of a version of a creature or a scene) and calling attention to the physical boundaries of a diorama that was intended to be an illusion symbolize the distant, limited experience we have of animals today.

A shift is beginning to take place as young people visiting educational institutions find virtual representations and interactive screens more engaging than traditional displays such as taxidermy and dioramas. The death, despondence, and sense of removal and foreboding in my photographs reflect on these same qualities on the subject of taxidermy's future in a changing world, a world in which what is considered a "real" experience with animals is certainly transforming.

I have always felt an attraction to animals, especially the intimacy their death permits. In Cher Ami, I explore the meaning of examining animals' bodies up-close, as I have done since childhood, and spend quiet moments appreciating the significant lives of the beings with which we share the planet. These photographs express the magic and beauty of being intimately close to animals in death.

Cher Ami was a famously loyal homing pigeon who, during World War I, suffered a shot to the breast and a destroyed leg, yet diligently delivered a message that saved hundreds of lives. The meaning of his name is "Dear Friend." Animals play many roles to us as humans; to me, their most significant role is as kindred spirits; dear friends. However, wild animals are just that – undomesticated, untamed, and dangerous to handle in life. As much as I wanted to keep the wild birds, rabbits, and foxes that allowed me to get close to them in my childhood, I understand and respect that the nature of their life is to be separate from me. While holding the vessels for their spirits in my hands, I reflect on their incredible beauty. I rest them in the light of prism-cut glass windows, light that was at one time thought to be given from god, or, in the case of prisms and rainbows, magic.

Literally, rainbows sort color into categories of light. The rainbow is also a gradient, a spectrum, much like a map or grid made for scientific purposes. According to Seeing the Light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Color, Vision, and Holography, since one's own particular eye is subjective in the perception of a rainbow, "it is your own private rainbow. The light... reaches your eye and misses everyone else's." This literature also states that "as you move... the rainbow moves with you... and you never can get any closer to... its 'end.'" The appreciation I feel for animals is my own private experience. I cannot expect others to feel the way I do; these pictures are made as an expression of my own reaction to animal life. As much as I try to understand animals, there will forever be a certain barrier; I can never get any closer to them. Our perception of animals is veiled, no matter how much we can learn from them and their bodies after their death.

At Rest is a photographic series depicting roadkill on American highways and addressing our human fear of confronting death and viewing the dead. My images draw attention to the fact that, while man has a vast impact on animal and natural life, generally in American society, people are separate from wildlife and the souls of animals have little value. To cause the viewer to feel struck by this notion, I photograph memorials I have built surrounding roadkill at the location at which its life was taken. At Rest expresses the sacredness to the bodies of animals hit by vehicles while crossing the road.