Am I An Animal? — Logan St Hilaire

Logan St Hilaire

Film
Photography
Exhibitions
Installation

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Am I An Animal?

Duo Exhibition.
Collaborator: Alicia Cook

Scanography, photography,
sculpture, interactive installation,
endurance-based actions.

Am I an Animal? is a collaborative art exhibition by Alicia Cook and Logan St Hilaire that questions human-animal relationships. Through photography, video, and sculpture, this exhibition confronts viewers with mortality, coexistence, exploitation, and the tension between human dominance and animal agency.

This exhibition uses animal bodies to represent hostile environments that threaten both animal and human life, emphasizing shared vulnerabilities between species. Am I An Animal? Invites viewers to reconsider their connection with animals, seeing animals and humans not as two separate beings but as one.

Through the use of scanography, photography, and the embodied practice of hunting deer, the work foregrounds the discomfort inherent in contemporary discourses of conservation, sustainability, and environmental stewardship.

These gestures resist the sanitization of “nature” as an abstract or aestheticized entity and instead insist upon proximity; often an intimate, unresolved closeness to animal bodies and their afterlives. Sculpture, interactive installation, endurance-based actions, and photography operate in parallel, forming a collage of practices that trouble coherent narratives and deny the viewer a position of moral or emotional ease.

The work deliberately engages contradiction: care alongside violence, reverence alongside extraction, empathy alongside domination. By cultivating an atypical closeness with deceased animals, the work aims to erode the presumed boundary between human and animal, exposing it as a porous and politically motivated construction rather than a fixed biological truth.

Moving beyond shared needs such as water and sustenance, the project examines parallel experiences between humans and animals at the level of labor, vulnerability, and bodily consequence. Natural processes are mobilized as sites through which broader political, ethical, and ecological questions unfold; particularly those concerning exploitation, productivity, and the selective valuation of life within environmental science. In doing so,
Am I an Animal positions the human not as steward or observer, but as an implicated participant within the systems it seeks to control.

All specimens pictured were legally salvaged under a state permit through the Museum of Biological Diversity for educational and scientific purposes.

Bedroom, 2025-2026.

Color, sound, runtime,looped.
Dimensions variable. 2026.

The trail camera only records when triggered by motion detection, the surveillance of movement being observed. Through invasive documentation and archive, our bodies transcend traditional human categories, becoming specimen subject to the viewer's gaze.

Bedroom is an endurance performance video work spanning one and a half years of self-surveillance through a trail camera, an autonomous imaging device capturing action in domestic space, blurring the line of delineation between humans and animals through the appropriation of traditional hunting equipment.

Within the footage, viewers may describe the behavior as active, boring, mundane, or routine; this process becomes similar to the phenomenon of humans viewing other animals, whether in a zoo or in nature.

Within the preservation of the banal and a stark refusal of entertainment, questions of ethics and exploitation arise.