Sayler/Morris and Christina Seely: museum

Made up of photographs of the dismantling of the old Smithsonian's Fossil Hall in preparation for its current rebuild, museum explores how cultural institutions transform fossilized, fragments into entire narrative worlds for a public—and it invites readers into that imaginative process.

The book consists of images made during the artists’ tenure as Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows. Granted rare access to the process of demolition, the artists photographed dinosaurs, dioramas, and displays as they were disassembled, crated up, and moved into storage. These photographs, combined with those of artifacts belonging to the museum's scientific illustrator, reveal a museum not as a static repository of facts but as a place where knowledge is continually assembled, revised, and reimagined. 

The resulting images often appear uncannily intentional, as though the museum itself had become a stage set between performances. Fossils, mannequins, and display cases seem suspended between past and future, storage and display, science and myth.

 

The book combines these photographs with original essays by philosopher Timothy Morton, author and primatologist Dr Christine Webb, and artist/architect/futurist Liam Young. Together, the images and texts ask us to imagine knowledge as an evolving process of creation and to think about our responsibilities in terms of what fossils we will leave behind for Earth's future inhabitants to find.