To find her subjects, Nicole Hatanaka went into the workspaces, storage areas, offices, and backrooms of natural history museums and laboratories, focusing on arrangements of objects that are unexpected, accidental, and commonly overlooked.

A series of her photographs, Taxinomia, is featured in The Atelier Gallery at the Stoneham Theatre in Stoneham, MA, March 3 through April 4. An opening reception is March 4, 6-7:30 p.m. The exhibit runs parallel to the theater’s production of The Dinosaur Musical.

“Underscoring my project is an interest in how specimens become worthy of preservation and study,” says Hatanaka. “What gets preserved and what gets thrown away? Which objects are put on a pedestal and which in a drawer? What determines value?”

In broader terms, she says, “My practice is an attempt to deconstruct such binaries as ordinary and extraordinary, order and disorder, official and non-official, valuable and insignificant, in order to reframe the ways in which meaning may be constructed and interpreted for both the individual and the collective.”

“Nicole Hatanaka’s Taxinomia speaks to the impulse of the collector that exists in many of us,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “What drives us to gather stones and bones and slimy things in jars? Perhaps it is an attempt to surround ourselves with those objects that give way to wonder and fascination.”

Hatanaka received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2004 and a master of fine arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the Center for Fine Art Photography, the Garner Center in Boston, and the New York Hall of Science. Her work has also been featured in publications such as American Photography 25. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.