Appropriating the aesthetic of John James Audubon, Kevin Sloan explores the poetic dimensions of nature using a representational, scientific style. His images of the natural world feature intricately rendered birds that evoke Audubon’s realist approach and taxonomic faithfulness. Yet Sloan, aware that photography has supplanted the need for such realistic paintings, incorporates surrealist and vanitas elements into his work. “Freed from the need to describe for science, I can describe the natural world and our interaction with it through an allegorical, social, and political lens,” he has said. For example, in Sloan’s paintings, a bird may clutch a timepiece or poke its head out from a vanitas-style arrangement of fruit. Subtly allegorical, his work probes the relationship between humans, animals, and nature in the contemporary world.