Influential Import, 2021

By displaying artifacts from childhood hunting trips with my father, this work is meant to capture those memorial experiences. As a child, while I loved collecting insects, I had very little interest in hunting animals with the older men in my family. Even though my father and grandfather would be proud if I shot a deer, the excitement would be overshadowed by tremendous amounts a guilt and sadness. Pheasant hunting was a good compromise in that the bird’s death was very quick and I didn’t have to hide in a deer stand for hours. For this reason, I would reluctantly go out west on Pheasant hunting trips with my father and his friends, but not for the same reason they did. As an insect collector I knew the importance of collecting specimens not only in your home state, but from as many different locations as possible. Hunting trips were a good opportunity for me to collect new insect variants that I wouldn’t have been able to in Michigan. In the day time we would all hunt, and once the sun set, I was ready to check my moth traps. By this time in the evening my dad and his friends would all be drinking around the campfire while I was busy doing my own form of hunting. Along with the insects, I would also collect some of the beer cans that would be left behind. The majority of my dad’s hunting buddies were Japanese and would bring imported beer which were much more visually appealing than American beer cans. To resemble these experiences, I will incorporate insects and beer cans with a Pheasant overlooking them.