GETTING UNDER THEIR SKIN
Animal Inside Out comes to Ottawa
WHAT IT IS
An exhibition of real bodies of animals and humans, or parts thereof, in various states of disassembly, at the Canadian Museum of Nature in downtown Ottawa.
The exhibition begins with invertebrates, from bivalves to a nasty looking mako shark to a dissected giant squid (though not the most giant of the giant squids, which, at up to 18 metres in length, would reach halfway up Metcalfe Street).
The main exhibition room has exhibits both tiny — a rabbit brain the size of a small walnut, which raises questions about how Bugs Bunny always outsmarted Elmer Fudd — and huge. Ostriches are dwarfed by a camel, which is trisected into three vertical slices that seem to be racing each other. Two giraffes tower over all. One giraffe has had its skin stripped away (or flensed, as whalers would say), so all of its organs, tissues and bones are plain to see. A second giraffe is a collection of horizontal cross sections, stacked and hung vertically, like some macabre, futuristic board game.
There’s a human body with its front half sliced and then hinged open like a door, revealing the organs and other vital bits. Its arm is posed at an angle as if waving at passersby. That is one happy-looking skinned corpse.
Information panels throughout the exhibition space share much information about genetics, nervous systems, and the other processes that make humans and other creatures go. They also explain the show’s history.
WHERE IT COMES FROM
Animal Inside Out, in Canada for the first time, comes from the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany. The plastination process of preserving animals was invented by Gunther von Hagens in 1977. The previous Body Worlds exhibition focused on human specimens with only a few non-human creatures and toured the world to much acclaim. The latest exhibition focuses on animals, with a few human components. For example, visitors can hold a real human heart, or touch the muscles or bones inside a real, flensed human arm.
HOW DO THEY DO IT
Plastination can take up to a year, one museum employee explains. The process starts with the body, or body part, in formaldehyde, to prevent decomposition. Then comes an acetone bath, which drains fluid from the tissues and replaces it with acetone. The specimen then goes into a vacuum chamber that evaporates the acetone, and replaces it with silicon. As a result, the real arm, when touched, feels rather like plastic.
WHERE IT FEELS LIKE ART
“When you work in a field like ours, you realize that nature is the work of art,” says Angelina Whalley, director of the Institute for Plastination, designer of Animal Inside Out, and wife of von Hagens. “When we want lay people to look at these specimens, the specimens need to serve additional purposes other than just the science — they need to be looking appealing, they need to be looking fascinating, so that you also narrow the gap between the living and the dead.”
Many creatures in the exhibition are actively posed, such as elk that leap across the plains, for example, or an immense bull that is set to charge, like an army tank made of muscle.
All this creates an eerie sense of life that transcends education. The many cross-sections of animals — the largest being an Asian elephant — are extremely thin, and unsuspecting viewers may assume they’re looking at fine drawings, and not thin sections that were sliced from an actual animal.
But science flirts with art most strongly when the exhibition considers the circulatory system, with animals that have been reduced to a body of blood vessels and then injected with a red polymer. A dead dog is posed as if full of life, eager to play and vibrant red from nose to tail, like something created by British artist Damien Hirst.
BEST QUOTE
“I can tell you it’s quite an endeavour to put an entire elephant through a band saw,” Whalley says.
It may sound creepy, but kids love it: There were toddlers at the media preview (these new interns get younger every year), and when they saw the giraffes they squealed with delight, even as some adults appeared unsettled.
“To be honest,” Whalley says, “I’ve never met anyone inside the exhibition who was freaked out … If there’s any hesitance or criticism, it’s mostly from people outside who have never seen the exhibition, but just judge from what they have in mind.”
Animal Inside Out is fascinating, and quite unlike anything that Ottawa has seen before. If you go, just relax and be comfortable. You may want to introduce yourself by shaking hands with the arm.