August 25th – 31th, 2014
Opening: Thursday 28th August 6:30pm
At The Library Project
This series of photographs represent places where zoo animals are presented to the public. David O’Shaughnessy photographed these humanly organised environments in London, Dublin and New York between 1997 and 2005. The environments themselves form exhibits that emulate indigenous animal habitats. In O’Shaughnessy’s photographs, the apparent absence of animals intensifies the effect of these places and the act of looking itself. The viewer’s attention is focused into a seemingly erratic environment that is a highly structured world of architecture, set design and elements of wild landscape, combining artificial and natural resources, presented for both human and animal consumption. The ordering of such spaces mirrors our own world in how we alternately view what is exhibited and the boundaries of display. O’Shaughnessy’s work considers the scientific uses of these spaces and the experience of the visitor presented with them as a place to look at animals as our ‘other’. Focusing on individual locations and concentrating on different areas within each, these photographs pose questions of what comes between human and animal worlds.
