museum is a collaboration with Christina Seely and Sayler/Morris that began when the artists were Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. Sayler/Morris and Seely worked for a month out of the National Museum of Natural History at a time that coincided with their dismantling of the iconic Fossil Hall in preparation for a renewed vision. Their photographs show fossils packed away, murals peeled back, and hidden supports exposed— revealing the museum as a layered structure of time, matter, and narrative. As cabinets emptied and walls stripped, sedimented histories surfaced: scientific knowledge, institutional choices, and the ideologies shaping public displays.

 

The images are alternately bizarre, sad, humorous and poetic.  Because the hall still had the dark ambience and dramatic spotlights of an exhibition, the partially dismantled displays seem jarringly intentional, as if this was an alternate reality of the museum, or as if the specimens were actors in a play now taking a break. In many ways, the artists found this state of the hall to be an apt representation of the Anthropocene, as well as a meditation on the constructedness of knowledge and the necessity for imagination in cultivating a true sense of deep time and kinship with non-human beings. The book form of museum will be published by Gnomic Book in September 2026. An inaugural exhibition at LightWork will open at the same time.