Black Bears on Bath Salts

Black Bears on Bath Salts has provided biological specimens, taxidermy, mortuary memorabilia, and unsettling artifacts to discerning shoppers of the macabre since 2012.

Rachel Poliquin writes, “Taxidermy rebuilds animals with human longing.” Filled with the desire to see decay frustrated, to see nature impotent but with the whole range of its potency arrayed, to commune with what is wild or forged in instinct, taxidermy subverts death, elides it, plucks the moment of mortality from Death and places it in the gaze of the viewer –– or the cabinet of the collector.

Once symbolic of colonial expansion and the belief in man’s potential to understand and master his world, specimen collecting now reads as elegiac, as that “mastery” proved to be both illusory and ultimately cataclysmic. Whereas once a wunderkammer stood in testament to the world’s capacity for wonder, one must now experience that wonder simultaneously with consciousness of its vanishing, now past the point of inevitability, the longing to tame death also the longing to record what was briefly vibrant, and is lost.