Animalia

Dario Zucchi has spent many years roaming the great art museums in the large cities of the eastern United States, particularly New York City and Washington, DC. He has explored the significant collections of modern art for the vast majority of his studies in the relationships between visitors and art. Beginning in 2013, however, he turned to a new, fertile source of inspiration for his juxtapositions between life and art: the annual Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice Awards exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. While Zucchi’s photographs of animals comprise a small percentage of his overall work, these are consistently among the most popular of his works in exhibitions.

Again, he sometimes aligns the head and hairstyle of the museum visitor with the animal image, producing a surprising illusionistic confrontation between hair and fur. In many cases animals’ eyes and heads are almost completely obscured by a human head. Zucchi constructs these delightful images using a cast of mammals that includes giraffes, red kangaroos, porcupines, and moose (figs. 235, 236, 306, and 314). In other cases he focuses on eye-to-eye contact between humans and creatures. The somewhat unsettling glare of an animal’s intense stare out toward the viewer is returned by the appropriately dressed figure obviously gazing back. Birds occasionally appear here (fig. 310) but most startling are the oversize reptiles and amphibians (figs. 239 and 241). The nocturnal image of the blue-hooded spectator meeting the glowing eyes of the American alligator may initially shock a viewer. Zucchi’s revelation of an encounter between a visitor and an immense photograph of a Green Bright-Eye Frog, on the other hand, is charming in its directness. The size and color of the figure’s red ski cap add to the pleasure of the artist’s masterful composition. 

Occasionally in Zucchi’s work a figure’s costume blends so perfectly into the design of the animal photograph that the viewer can’t initially distinguish where one ends and the other begins. Only after careful examination does it become clear that the back of the head of the huge Toco Toucan is actually a hooded figure with a golden coat (fig. 237).  Such a recognition is exactly the surprise and delight that Zucchi hopes to produce.

Yet another unusual strategy that Zucchi employs is to juxtapose the appropriately styled hair of a woman beneath the outstretched paws of an animal. In these cases the enjoyable parallel suggests an actual physical interaction between animal and onlooker.

Dogs figure prominently in at least two of Zucchi’s works. In one of his earliest and most popular photographs two young girls dance joyfully on the steps of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in concert with Anna Hyatt Huntington’s bronze Greyhounds Playing (fig. 005). Conversely, the motionless dog on the black sweatshirt of the visitor seems to stare, waiting to bay at the moon depicted in Hamish Fulton’s painted wall (fig. 415).