In this new body of work, San Francisco-based photographer Richard Barnes
continues his exploration of the way humans collect, classify, value, contextua-
lize and display artifacts in an institutional setting, and how presentation
methods have evolved over the centuries. For the last 10 years Barnes' work
has followed the trajectory of objects from burial ground to museum collections,
culminating here with images from some of the oldest natural history museums
in the world.

Barnes recently discovered and photographed several rare disarticulated or
"exploded" animal skulls. In the 1850s, Claude Beauchene developed a method
of separating skull bones along the suture lines as an aid to scientific research.
Mounted on elaborate stands, the skulls are reminiscent of early arrested motion
studies by such photographers as Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton.
Barnes' images reveal the fetishized aspects of these strange and fascinating
objects, caught in a state of frozen entropy.

Other photographs in the exhibition include animal skeletons from the storage
rooms of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in Paris. Like the disarticulated
skulls, these images are elemental and sculptural, exposing the sublime architec-
ture of the body. Color photographs of animal exhibits from the Peabody Museum
at Yale University, the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Smithsonian, and
other museums add further layers of complexity, inquiry, and oddity to Barnes' on-
going investigation of the history of display.