Follow this link to artist Michelle Turriani’s online exhibit featuring vanitas assemblies with the skulls of endangered species:
The human skull of the Vanitas or Memento Mori painting is substituted by an animal one. The viewers are invited to review their existential questioning beyond the confines of their own individual destiny and to embrace their position within the natural world. All the skulls featured belong to animals on the Red List of Threatened Species. The title of the series, Memento Exstingui, offers an insight into the essay’s symbolic approach. It paraphrases Memento Mori and it shifts the focus to the more holistic existential concern of extinction, open in the latin to be interpreted as the loss of the individual or of a whole species.