Wild Things is a work-in-progress.

Wild Things draws connections from the modern Florida state-mandated hunt of invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades National Park to Teddy Roosevelt’s natural history dioramas of taxidermied wild animals. The project examines these scenes as an ideological stage where narratives around belonging, identity, authority, and American mythology are fixed and asserted. Through this project, Sunny continues experimentation with docu-fiction to unearth marginal narratives. The exhibition expands on a four-year body of work exploring xenophobia through the lens of invasive species.

Photographs ranging from palm-sized squares to large prints, from field documentation, staged studio photography, and appropriated archival material, show professional python hunters ambiguously presented through cut-outs and abstractions. The hunters are depicted searching, wrangling with something, but the “other” is rendered illegible. Images of hunters posing with their catch are edited and obstructed so their prize is no longer there; an allusion to violence fills the absence.