Austin Cullen
Austin Cullen is a Houston based photographer and printmaker. He received his BFA from Stephen F. Austin State University in 2019, and his MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2022. His current project explores museum natural displays and the natural world, and how they influence and affect one another. Austin's work has been included in numerous venues including the Houston Center for Photography, Filter Photo, and the Midwest Center for Photography. He has also had his work exhibited in online spaces like Urbanautica: Ethical Shifts in Photography (2021), Undisclosed Resource (2021), and Dodho Magazine.
A Natural History (Built to be Seen)
A Natural History (Built to be Seen) catalogs the various ways the western natural world is presented and constructed within museums. As someone who grew up visiting natural history museums, I've always been fascinated by the extravagant ways museums framed the American landscape.
Dramatic dioramas, interactive virtual experiences, and miniaturized landscapes all act as windows into the natural world. While this framing acts as a guide for reading and understanding nature, the same frame can be analyzed to understand the complex and ever-changing relationship between people and land.
Museums teach us about our environment, but often separate us from it. In an age of global climate crisis, it’s imperative to re-evaluate our understanding of nature. By creating images that subvert the viewer's ideas of what is natural or not, I’m asking the viewer to recognize how influential museum nature is on their understanding of the larger natural world.