Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Colleen Plumb: Thirty Times a Minute

Colleen Plumb: Thirty Times a Minute

Plumb, Colleen
Bekoff, Marc
Pierce, Jessica

Hardcover

General PhotographyPhotographers

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1942185456
ISBN13: 9781942185451
Publisher: Radius Books
Published: Feb 25 2020
Pages: 120
Weight: 4.75
Height: 1.70 Width: 10.00 Depth: 13.30
Language: English

Captive elephants exhibit what biologists refer to as stereotypy, which includes rhythmic rocking, head bobbing, stepping back and forth, and pacing. Colleen Plumb traveled to over seventy zoos in the US and Europe to film this behavior, and distilled her footage into a video that weaves together dozens of captive elephants, bearing the weight of an unnatural existence in their small enclosures. She has installed guerrilla public projections of the video in over 100 locations worldwide, constructing photographs of each projection. Thirty Times a Minute (the resting heart rate of an elephant) explores the ways in which animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and consumption masks curiosity. The work sheds light on abnormal behaviors of captive elephants in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice. The presence of massive, intelligent, far-roaming, emotional animals such as elephants in urban zoos exemplifies contradiction and discordance, and public projections of their image onto urban walls and out-of-context surfaces add to the layers of incongruity.

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