10/26/2026
Published by Light Work, and in conjunction with Gnomic Book, museum, by Sayler/Morris and christina seely, presents photographs of the dismantling of the old Smithsonian’s Fossil Hall in preparation for its remodeling as the David Koch Hall of Deep Time. The inaugural exhibition for the project is open at Light Work until December 11.. museum — the exhibition and publication — explores how cultural institutions transform fragments of knowledge into entire narrative worlds for a public – and it invites the audience into that imaginative process.
The book consists of images made during the artists’ tenure as Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows. Granted rare access to the process of demolition, the artists photographed dinosaurs, dioramas, and displays as they were disassembled, crated up, and moved into storage. These photographs, combined with those of artifacts belonging to both the museum’s scientific illustrator and its lead curator, reveal a museum not as a static repository of facts but as a place where knowledge is continually assembled, revised, and reimagined.
The resulting images often appear uncannily intentional, as though the museum itself had become a stage set between performances. Fossils, mannequins, and display cases seem suspended between past and future, storage and display, science and myth.
The book combines these photographs with original essays by philosopher Timothy Morton, author, primatologist Dr Christine Webb, artist/architect/futurist Liam Young and the artists themsleves, as well as poetic fragments from interviews with the Smithsonian illustrator and curator. Together, the images and texts ask us to imagine knowledge as an evolving process of creation and to think about our responsibilities in terms of what fossils we will leave behind for Earth’s future inhabitants to find.
$52
Hardcover, 256 pages
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