| Violence and brutality aside, if you were ever unsure of how ridiculous hunting can seem in modern terms, Angela Singer spells it out. Singer has explored the notion of the hunt and its trophies for a number of years and while her subjects explicitly reference the idea, her process pointedly undermines the esteem of hunting for trophy.
Trophy hunting in New Zealand does not have the social prowess as in Britain, but is still very much a red-blooded sport. It represents a regressive urge to connect with the natural and instinctive animal self and is emblematic of macho stereotypes of man-as-hunter. |
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Little Animals
Violence and brutality aside, if you were ever unsure of how ridiculous hunting can seem in modern terms, Angela Singer spells it out. Singer has explored the notion of the hunt and its trophies for a number of years and while her subjects explicitly reference the idea, her process pointedly undermines the esteem of hunting for trophy.
Trophy hunting in New Zealand does not have the social prowess as in Britain, but is still very much a red-blooded sport. It represents a regressive urge to connect with the natural and instinctive animal self and is emblematic of macho stereotypes of man-as-hunter. But Singer’s stuffed animals are not pumped with the bravado one might expect from classical trophies, quite the contrary – her animals are openly passive and often appear pathetic, thus highlighting the grotesqueness of human manipulation of the animal world.
In a kind of reversal of taxidermy, Singer tears and rips away at flesh and maneuvers her subjects out of the forced poses in which they were once cast and presents them in less exotic situations. The apparent helpless and docile nature of the hunted, exaggerates the blatant cruelty of the killing. She embellishes the bullet wounds in the animal’s skins, which previously had been carefully diminished in the ritual of taxidermy and often decorates them with gemstones and jewelry. In Squeak a sparrow perches on the side of a goat head eating at the evidently infested site of the bullet wound. Bugs and maggot-like worms swim freely from the hole, highlighting the organics of death and decay. In other works her subjects are lamented with decorations of funeral flowers.
In her recent series Troubled-Over Phantoms Singer cloaks taxidermy animals in pvc skins. Many of them are birds presented on perches, dressed up in little coverings, not dissimilar to the sheet-over-the-head ghost costume. Although somewhat comical, they do have a surprisingly ominous presence and raise serious questions regarding the ethics of interactions between human and animal.
For some, her works may appear to be as cruel as the sport she comments on, but Singer is an animal activist and as such, all of her materials are sourced secondhand -a quest evidently not that difficult given the now unfashionable nature of hunting trophies. Through the years, Singer has found that even the proud hunters loose interest in their trophies. So abortive is the exploitation that, like many objects, over time hunting trophies become objects invisible to those that live with them.
