2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageExtant erosions
Emma Ressel
Saturday, March 21 - 3:30PM to 4:30PM
Agusta
Meandering through archived materials stored in various natural history collections including glass slides, taxidermy, preserved animals, and minerals, Extant Species poises the natural history museum as a prism through which we refract our human understandings of nature, land, and time. I examine the natural history institution as an important space for the general public to encounter and remember extinct and extant animals, but also an insufficient and even perverse gesture to "save". Against our efforts, erosions are multitudinous: water reshapes rock, species collapse and disappear, taxidermy skins age, and photographic archives shift meaning as outdated slides gather dust.
This project represents five years of photographing in museum collections and three modes of engaging with natural history archives: The first mode consists of still life photographs I construct with specimens housed in collections. The second is a collection of 100-year-old glass lantern slides housed at University of New Mexico that I scanned and refabricated, which depict New Mexican geology and paleontology research in the 1920s and 30s. Thirdly, I talk back to the archive with contributions from my personal photo archive, which includes slides of lizards made by my biologist dad and I over the last 30 years.
Extant Erosions was exhibited as a solo show at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in the spring of 2025 with an accompanying photobook. The project asks an intersecting natural history museum and fine art audience to consider how animal preservation, dioramas, and photo documentation shape our perception of the natural world. Through witnessing, capturing, cataloging, and preserving, we wrestle with describing nature—first to create meaning, and then to remember what is rapidly lost to extinction and time.
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