Wild Window

Wild Window is Andrea Ferrari’s personal cabinet of curiosities, a collection of photos of taxidermy animals, shells, eggs and coral that explores the gaze as a universal trait shared by both humans and animals.

In its format and design Wild Window recalls a naturalist’s notebook full of wonderful creatures observed on an imaginary journey to exotic lands. The book thus shows our age-old desire to record and classify nature, as well our passion for re-living it through studying specimens of flora and fauna. Yet Ferrari’s vision is far from impersonal or scientific. He arranges his photos in a loose grid rich with ambivalence and associations, and colors many images a soft, muted pink that references the familiar hue of human skin. In Ferrari’s hands nature is an interaction where creatures observe us as we observe them, and we weave intuitive narrative connections between all that we see.

Ferrari … deliberately reverts to ambiguity and evokes what is not present in the image to recall the experience of vision and its consequences for knowledge and interpreting the world… This throws the cycle into a new dimension, that of cosmogony, of being able to re-create a world from its images and figures. Walter Guadagnini