Artist Rachel Stern has images in “All the Worlds a Stage,” a group show including Stern, Benjamin Fredrickson and Bear Kirkpatrick that’s currently on display at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York City. Some of the images [slides 5, 6 and 7) were a collaboration between Stern and James Lyman, a performance artist and painter who worked on the sets and concepts for those pieces. The following was provided to PDN from Stern via e-mail:

“The photographs currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art’s ‘All the Worlds a Stage’ are a projection of my escapist fantasy of everyday life. They are constructed out of essentially commonplace objects (and some fancy taxidermy) but arranged to appear as an opulent paradise. All of the photographs are made entirely in camera. This is important because I see them mostly as curatorial suggestions for daily life. I enjoy the tension that is created between their apparent fantasy and their actual banality–they are just objects and people decorated with accessible materials. I hope that the photographs say something about beauty’s ability to affirm life; to remind us that beyond the hardships and tribulations of daily existence there are wonders latent in the common world.”