Blood Lust is Heather Straka’s 2012 photo series from her William Hodges Fellowship in Invercargill. Six local athletes, a stylist’s exacting touch, and a studio stacked with benches, chalkboards, and taxidermy create dense, theatrical tableaux—part trophy room, part science lab.

Straka teases the myths of masculinity and desire: immaculate whites, blonde comb-overs, stuffed beasts, guns, and hints of testosterone equation diagrams. Surfaces seduce—creams, greys, reds—while identities tilt and blur, the artist shifting between hunter and hunted, naturalist and provocateur.