Tasha Ostrander has been working as a professional artist for the past 22 years. She began her art studies as an apprentice for photographers Walter Chappell and Willard Van Dyke. In her twenties, she completed a one year residency at the Maine Photographic Workshops and received a BFA from the University of New Mexico. During her studies at UNM, she shifted her main focus of photography to the broader multi-media realm of installation-art and took to the working philosophy that the medium will always be chosen according to the conceptual project at hand. She exhibited her smaller assemblage work in galleries for several years before taking on more committed, large scale, time-demanding projects. ‘Seventy-Three in a Moment’ was one of Ostrander’s more ambitious pieces, completed in 1996. For one entire year she devoted eight hours a day to create the 26,645 handmade butterflies representing an average life span. In 1997, she had a solo show at the New Mexico Museum of Art, ‘Quinter’s Thought Trap’, followed by numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York, New Mexico and Amsterdam. Her most recent solo show, ‘Plains of Apparition’, opened in 2014 in Santa fe, New Mexico, with a series of photographs that show a journey of ancestral history and her family’s participation in the development of the dioramas at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. For Ostrander, natural history museums, collections and collectors of natural specimen are some of the main subject matter she uses to create a language in the complex inquiry into our connectedness and alienation with our natural environment. She creates installations, making things orderly, obsessive and constructed as perception towards a micro and macro visual narrative, as strategy towards her ongoing investigation of our internal and external placement within nature.