Richard Ross - Fine Art Photography Gallery

Notes on MUSEOLOGY

In "Museology," Richard Ross lures us into the childhood dream of being locked inside an otherwise closed museum—it's hallowed halls ours and ours alone. But are we really alone, Ross teasingly asks, or do the souls of all these stuffed and tagged creatures hover just outside their former shells, suspended in time, too? Ross' young son may have sparked this idea, years ago, on a visit to the Muséum National D'Histoire Naturelle in Paris: "Don't go near there!" he warned his father, pointing at some towering creature. "Not to worry, they're all dead," Ross reassured, saddened more than unsettled by the herds of taxidermied wildlife. "Well if they're dead," his son demanded, "why are they standing there?" Ross was struck by the realization that his three-year-old only feared the "loose" animals, not those behind glass; it was as if this physical barrier, not the passage of hundreds of years, was what separated the living from the dead.

Partitions—between present and past, beating hearts and still ones, the natural and the man-made, reality and irreality—are a constant theme in Ross' work. His obsessive documentation of the woolly, scaly and horned artifacts in these lonely spaces has given us a humorously refreshing take on museum culture and the strange whims of science. But more poignant, in these not-so-musty tableaux, is Ross' nod to childhood and the limitlessness of the imagination.