It’s a family event; you go and see animals you otherwise wouldn’t be able to, and you have a good time.

I hadn’t been to a zoo for a number of years when I moved to Melbourne, but I went a couple of days after I arrived. Something didn’t quite sit right. It might have been the expensive admission fee, or the urban location where I could hear trams and trains on the other side of the fence. Or maybe I was just wondering why animals needed to live in cages. Whatever it was, that visit sparked my interest in looking critically at zoos. Wunderkammer constitutes an evolution of that interest, using archives and multimedia to investigate the relationship between humans and animals.

Lion, 2020
Archival inkjet print
120mm x 150mm

Bear, 2020
Archival inkjet print
120mm x 118.5mm

Camels, 2020
Archival inkjet print
120mm x 150mm

Photoshoot, 2020
Adhesive archival inkjet print
3000mm x 2932mm

Eagle, 2020
Archival inkjet print
120mm x 150mm

Spider Monkey, 2020
Archival inkjet print
120mm x 721mm

Polar Bears, 2020
Archival inkjet print
120mm x 150mm

Animal Cam, 2020
Video, screen recorded from zoo livestreams
Duration 6:35

Cara Rixon’s website