Beginning in November 2020 and throughout the following year I traveled to 15 zoos to photograph animals in captivity with the intention of staging them inside the Thorne Miniature Rooms—on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago—as updated natural history dioramas. “Captive Splendor” was created during a period in history when a global pandemic, environmental disasters, and social unrest forever altered our sense of home, health, and safety. The country was at least partially “locked-down” throughout the period that this series was made, adding unexpected layers of meaning.

As our lives were miniaturized so too were the animals that I photographed.They are being used as paper dolls, pasted and posed—stand-ins for humans. They are fixed in bygone days, controlled by human impulses rather than their own. Like a cast of characters in a one-room drama, they interact with Mrs. Thorne’s scenic realism in ways more characteristic of humans than their species’ behavior. Part dollhouse, part theatrical set, part tableau, the reimagined rooms juxtapose the wild with the cultivated using digital taxidermy and contemporary discomfort.

That’s not the entire story. We lived with a disorienting narrowness not unlike the imposed barriers that challenge wild animals’ quality of life in captivity. As the pandemic continued, I was affected by visions of the planet’s future that seemed startlingly plausible now. Expanded narrative questions filtered into my process with new plot lines: Have the humans fled their homes? Have they disappeared into apocalyptic dust, leaving the zoo gates blown wide open? Have the animals repossessed an empty world? Are they sheltering in place? Is this an insurrection? Have they turned against us? Payback—a long time coming—for abuses too numerous to mention? No longer “cooped up” in steel-barred cages or behind concrete moats, they have broken free and moved in!

“Captive Splendor” contains 31 rooms currently, featuring over 150 species of animals. The majority have a conservation status of “near threatened” to “critically endangered.” The project was supported by a Sony Alpha+ female grant.

“Lisa’s background in theatre is entering into new bodies of work. Here, the artist melds animal life into images of the Thorne Miniature Rooms from collections found at the Art Institute of Chicago. She unites an ever-shrinking world for animal wildlife with confinements of our own construction. Timing of Frank’s Sony Alpha-Female award (bestowed during the pandemic) adds to complexities in thinking about shrinking environments. Her resulting compositions form the series “Captive Splendor” where the artist leads viewers to consider nonlinear, theatrical storylines that are at once sad and amusing, disturbing and whimsical.” - Anne Hughes, curator