Description

Natural Selection' is from 'Visitors', a series of photographs taken by Karen Knorr in the Museé d'Orsay, Paris. In her photographs, stuffed apes and monkeys appear as visitors to the museum's nineteenth-century sculpture gallery. The image inventively compares Charles Darwin's theory of evolution with the process of selection that is undertaken when placing famous works of art within an art-historical hierarchy. Knorr's work also alludes to the primarily French seventeenth- and eighteenth- century paintings known as 'singeries', in which monkeys are dressed in human clothes and depicted engaging in human activities. These conceits reflected on the nature of art and its powers of imitation.