Dreaming Animals

Artist Statement

I was reading a book review in the New York Times about a middle-aged woman consumed by the world's troubles when I came upon this sentence, "Her dreams are full of animals she cannot save." This sentence describes my current quarantine project: I print images of endangered animals from the digital collection of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and then re-photograph them in still lives created with related household objects. I make connections between animals and objects but also with my own childhood memories of games and treasure maps. Everyday another animal seems to be added to the list of endangered species – rhinos, tigers, polar bears...and on and on. Declining biodiversity is made surreal and stark as I photograph animals that no longer exist, whose existence is perilous, or who in some cases never existed at all except in the imagination.

MJ Millington is a poet, multimedia artist, and creator of the podcast Rime: Stories About Poetry. Her publications include My Secret Inky Vice, 17th Century Gentlemen Talk About Flowers, and others. She was the recipient of a 2021 Yale University Environmental Humanities Grant, as well as a winner of the Vermont Studio Center Broadside Competition 2020. She was the 2018 Edwin Way Teale Artist-in-Residence at Trail Wood; and in 2022 was nominated for Connecticut State Poet Laureate. She can be found at mjmillington.com.