Box Turtle by Katy Higgins

If the limits of what we can know about a species can be interpreted by the shape and definition of their environment, then a zoo is a trove of information for geologist, sociologist, and artist alike. Like Ian Whitmore, whom we wrote about yesterday, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Katy Higgins gives us glimpses into interiors without the dweller's presence--in this case, the man-made environments of zoo animals. We are challenged to glean what the animal is and how they live from what is in their space: water, branches, rocks, food, toys, sun or shade, despite it being a construction of their keepers' creation.

Katy writes of her project,

the images in the The Empty Exhibit are concerned with attempts to reduce the infinite complexity of the world to concrete visual representations--in a sense, to diagram life. In this case, my photographs document the false "natural" environments that are recreated in zoos, ostensibly both for the comfort of the animals on display and to inform and educate the viewer. These exhibits, then, hold the promise of presenting some kind of truth about the world, but they are necessarily limited - there is only so much we can learn about an animal and its native habitat through a life-size diorama, no matter how detailed it may be.

See more of Katy's work on her website.