Installation

INSTALLATION

Toy with Animals

Toy with Animals is an installation that took place in an empty storefront in downtown Ames, IA, for the month of April, 2018. The installation grapples with the reduction of animals to toys. As children play with toys that reference animals, they learn to feel empathy for another species without harming animals with actual contact, yet they also displace the animals’ actual context, habitat, agency, and behaviors. Toys reduce animals to a couple key aesthetic features, and toys then act as devices for the fictitious narratives that we spin up. Child’s play forms perceptions and misconceptions about animals and their natural contexts that is carried through into adulthood. To toy with something means to manipulate or handle it and its contexts. It is troubling that as adults, animals are still often treated as toys—put where we want, organized, admired when we are in the mood, ignored when we are fixated on something else, and tossed out when we outgrow them.