




In his series Until the Kingdom Comes, New York-based artist Simen Johan creates dramatic tableaux of wildlife with weird and unnatural twists. In the large-scale color photos and taxidermy-based sculptures, nothing is quite as it seems. A pair of white owls sit perched on a picnic table in the fog; a pair of foxes huddle together in the snow, crying; two moose battle in a rugged landscape, with green budgies alighting upon their antlers. The effect is unnerving. At first, the pictures and sculptures appear to belong in a natural history museum. Upon closer look, they dissolve into ecological disarray, leaving the viewer with a nagging sense that something is wrong. Which, of course, is exactly the point.
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