Installation view from the UN/GREEN exhibition at Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia, 2019

Photos by Kristīne Madjare

Isolated details of some of the organic models

Examples of the original postcard set Заповедные животные и растения: Выпуск 1, 1982

Snakes and Adders

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2019

digital illustration

An illustration composed of living organisms deceptively disguised between an array of other visually similar man-made objects. The animals and plants depicted are modeled solely after watercolor illustrations found on a set of old postcards portraying endangered species of the former Soviet Union. After individually researching the contents of each postcard online, the latest extinction status of some of the species remained unknown — the information about the subject being hidden within an oversaturation of similar, yet not completely accurate data. The resulting composition was created by imagining a future where these species have gone completely extinct and the only evidence of their existence is buried under a mass of misleading information. The artificial counterparts for disguising these organisms were selected and modeled by feeding the original illustrations to a reverse image search engine as well as by making personal associations.