Baker Artist Portfolios

In 1989 my 7th grade class took a trip to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. It was already one of favorite places to visit and I got right to work. I used two rolls of film to photograph almost every specimen display. My mom had them printed out at the drug store so that I could tape them all around my desk. They accompanied the xerox copies of zoological and botanical plates from our old encyclopedias.
The Fantomeka are a menagerie pulled from life, imaginings, and antique illustration. They are the mundane and uncanny animals that we experiment upon, mythologize, and inhabit. They are the animals we spoke to as children, and the animals we eat. Creatures cocooned here amid the flora, fungi and fluid of their fabled habitats. They are showing off, illuminated, in a burning panoply of colors. Like specimens under a microscope, stained to enhance the subjects under study.