Photos bring life to long-dead specimens from OSU collection
Death and decay can be beautiful. That is the stunning take-away from the exhibit “Theme(s) and Variation(s),” at the Shot Tower Gallery in the Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center.
About 100 photographs and photographic scans of dead and decaying birds, fish, insects and reptiles — all taken in recent months at Ohio State University’s Museum of Biological Diversity by artists Ardine Nelson and Fredrik Marsh — comprise the bulk of the exhibit.
Images of butterflies pinned to boards; turtles, eels and fish in specimen jars; and birds lined up symmetrically in display drawers create a gallery of expired life that, oddly, rarely seems gruesome but, instead, becomes an homage to the variety and fascination of once-living creatures.
Nelson and Marsh, who are married, created their works from several of the rich OSU collections, some of them begun as early as the mid-1800s.
Nelson photographed the specimens while Marsh scanned them for his works. Their photographs, some as large as 7 feet by 4 feet, are identified by the scientific (Latin) names of the amphibians, birds, fish, insects, mammals and reptiles.
Marsh’s “Sebastes norvegicus” is a largerthan-life scan of the skeleton of a Rose Fish, with a huge hole where the eye was and shreds of what resemble newsprint clinging to the body's bones.
One of Nelson’s works is a photograph “Golden Redfish” (“Sebastes norvegicus”) “Hummingbirds #5494”
of seven green-andsilver hummingbirds, arranged perpendicularly in a box with their beaks at the top. They are lovely but impossibly still — when, in life, they are blurs of movement.
A number of her photographs capture hundreds of insects and colorful butterflies, pinned in meticulous rows on boards.
Marsh’s works include a huge diptych of a Summer Flounder, captured in two scanned photographs.
The “variations” part of the exhibit title refers to several smaller series of works, including “I Am Lost to the World,” photoceramic memorial At a glance
• “Theme(s) and Variations(s): Ardine Nelson & Fredrik Marsh” continues through April 27 at the Shot Tower Gallery, Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center, 546 Jack Gibbs Blvd. Hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. For information, call 614-365-6681.
portraits that Marsh created by handscanning tombstones while he was teaching in Corona, Italy.
Shooting memorials, monuments and gardens over various periods in Germany and the Czech Republic between 2004 and 2016, Nelson created multiple-view landscapes including “Palace Castle Garden, Prague, Czech Republic” — a long, horizontal black-andwhite scene of a formal garden with a curved walkway, statue and view of the city.
The couple’s photographs of human-made moments, memorials and structures might initially seem out of place with the biological specimens. But the entire exhibit seems to be considering themes of preservation and appreciation.
Nelson, a professor emerita in Ohio State’s photography program, has won individual artist fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, among other awards.
Marsh, whose undergraduate and master’s degrees are from OSU, has won a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship as well as fellowships from the Ohio and Greater Columbus arts councils.
Both plan to continue their work photographing OSU’s biological specimens. The collections include “more than 2 million fish specimens alone,” Marsh said.
Added Nelson, “And we haven’t even gotten to all the collections.”
In her artist’s statement, Nelson describes the specimens as “beautiful, terrifying and at times even repulsive, yet they are a visual curiosity with an innate quality that draws one in even closer. What is this fascination with inspecting dead things? The jars, boxes and drawers each have the possibility of a visually interesting composition, a relationship between the companions I wished to discover and document. I have only just begun this project.”