Sean Foley has constructed and painted a diorama of his own working methods through critical excursions into the history of painting, cryptozoology, and the grotesque via taxonomies and perception. His work is often referred to as a curiosity cabinet of art history, imagery, and pop sensibilities. In his project he literally creates, in the real space of the museum, a curiosity cabinet of the conventions and expectations of painting and its subjects, such as bestiaries, menagerie paintings, and the "untamed" wilderness as other and unknown.

The Installation is a kind of compound "menagerie – history – painting - diorama. My sources range from Edward Hicks, Medieval Bestiaries, 16th century Cabinets of Wonder, Arcimboldo, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, natural history dioramas, and the birth of the Zoological Gardens in the 19th century. My conceptual strategies for generating this type of hybrid imagery and organizing the installation are through the concepts of the carnivalesque, grotesque, and monstrous. I am interested in animals, creatures, and monsters because of our tendencies to anthropomorphize them, which I feel is a powerful representational tool for the visual arts.