"Preserved" plushies in jars

Shelllllfff Canadian artist Ian Baxter's "Animal Preserve" series from 1999 featured hundreds of stuffed animals "preserved" in liquid-filled jars neatly organized on shelves. (via FP)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

MORE: art • toys • wunderkammer

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10xor01

Free Kermit!
trackofalljades

Does anyone else remember the Bonsai Kitten meme? Does the site even still exist?

I’ll never forget how absolutely INCENSED one of my coworkers became at the time over it, she was completely convinced it was real and freaked out all day about it.
- Gilbert Wham
  
  Bonsai Kitten was fantastic. There’s bits of it on the Internet Archive. It is STILL as effective to troll people with (I like to use the fact it’s only got a few pages on there now to add verisimilitude (‘Yeah, they got forced to pull the site, that’s why you can only see it here’). Like shooting fish in a barrel…
SomeGuyNamedMark

We can pickle that!
awjt

This is the saddest thing I have seen in a week. :-(
- Boundegar
  
  Then you’ve had a really sheltered week.
  - awjt
    
    Haha, but there’s nothing sadder than seeing pure love …behind glass and suspended in formaldehyde.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Indeed.
http://twitter.com/heartffruit Heartfruit

I saw that exhibit when it was at the National Gallery of Canada when we were in Ottawa around the millennial New Years. We spend a huge amount of time going from jar to jar to see if we recognized each stuffed animal.
Bradley Robinson

I’m uncertain whether to find this incredible or disturbing.

Perhaps both.
mtdna

That is totally fuc**d. I love it!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

It would be fun to put little electronic gizmos in with them, so they can periodically twitch, or mumble help meeeee . . . let me die!
HOTDAMN

Awesome.

Reminds me of Mike Kelly.
- chaopoiesis
  
  Mike’s on the bottom row, second from the left.
http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch

Possibly inspired by the rather unpleasant carny tradition of the “pickled punk”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_punks
http://www.facebook.com/thefishman1987 Eugene Singh

I have a “Baby Kermit” like that one.
http://profile.yahoo.com/QTYL6WV3JYPHCS5VYHIW6HXNKE David

Baxter& (pronounced “baxterand”) is actually his legal name.
welcomeabored

Jars of “preserved” plushies lined up on shelves behind me as I open up the door for little trick-or-treaters. Oooooh yeeeeeah.
Petzl

They’ll never get dusty.
bill_mcgonigle

It says distilled water on the site, but I doubt that would stay clear for very long. Any recommendations for a preservative that would be compatible with the stuffed animal fibers?
http://www.facebook.com/derek.ham.359 Derek Ham

The originator of Picked Pets was a artist called Ryan Exidore, based in Glasgow, Scotland, He developed and exhibited Picked Pets in 1997 and was even on the UK’s Big Breakfast TV show being interviewed about them. Unfortunately he’s no longer around…
Please see the attached article from the Glasgow Evening Times (May 1997).