DIORAMAS105situated in a contemporary art gallery, the diorama no longer ventrilo-
quizes the rhetoric of natural history but becomes a tool through which
this very rhetoric can be dismantled and appraised.
More specifically, in Dion’s diorama it is the work of realism that is
deliberately problematized. The artist is acutely aware that, despite the
range of materialities and technical approaches they entail, the ontologi-
cal difference between a cabinet of curiosity, a diorama, and a classical
painting is indeed minimal. All three are assemblages in which art and
nature intermingle for the purpose of producing images that always and
inevitably appear to be sedimentations of discourses. The selectivity with
which objects are included or excluded, the care with which they are as-
sembled within the epistemological architecture that confines them, the
intrinsic positioning of the viewer they designate, and the construction
of the scopic field—all these carefully orchestrated operations implicitly
embody multiple layers of ideological values. Dion also knows that for
these values to be delivered successfully, the illusion of realism must be
firmly in place. It is for this reason that Landfill incorporates all the aes-
thetic elements of classical natural history dioramas: the perspectival
painted background, the taxidermy seagulls, and the trash scattered ev-
erywhere in the diorama all present the viewer with a consistent level of
realism.
As in Dion’s reconfiguration of cabinets of curiosities, the idea is to
short-circuit objects, their interrelated discourses, and associated prac-
tices by collapsing or unmasking the rhetorical machinery that operates
underneath the realist veneer that characterizes them. Landfill thus in-
vites a negotiation between the sensory and the conceptual, a negotiation
defined by the material complicities that in this instance allude to the
nonhuman networks and ecosystems that we are substantially enmeshed
in but that we culturally disavow.
The first clash produced by Dion is between two registers of realism:
the formal realism of the painted background, the taxidermy animals,
and the objects included in the diorama, and the contextual realism of
the scene itself: a landfill. The setting of the landfill stands diametrically
opposed to the Garden of Eden aesthetic that has been traditionally con-
structed in dioramas. As previously seen, the prerogative of Victorian
dioramas excluded man from the unspoiled, deep nature depicted in
these scenes, but Dion subverts the rhetoric of the genre, inscribing