Portrait of Death highlights the unresolvable tension between life and death. The subjects, once living animals, are pictured inside an overwhelmingly desolate void, suspended between the act of life and oblivion of death. They are intentionally propped and posed so as to emphasize the mimetic nature of preserving. In the images, death presents itself as life but falls short, breeding a cold absence that can be seen in the confrontational gaze of the decapitated cow or the remembered liberation of the captured shrimp. The compositions’ simultaneous morbidity and compositional gracefulness serve to further complicate the aforementioned tension between life and death, beauty and carnage, primitiveness and gracefulness.
