Artist Kate Breakey loves beautiful things: an indigo bunting radiating an unearthly blue, its head tucked to its chest; a frog lying serenely on its back, its front feet clasped across its torso; a single calla lily twisting elegantly outward.

They're all gorgeous, and they're all dead.

Breakey's 'Small Deaths' series focuses on the corpses of what might in another age have been called lesser creatures--birds, rodents, lizards--and on wilting blooms unmoored from their roots. They're the kind of remains that all but the most asphalt-confined city dwellers run across and usually dismiss or dispose of quickly. Breakey, by contrast, spends hours in the studio with them, lighting and photographing them, then layering the larger-than-life prints with veils of translucent paints and colored pencils. The result is lushly beautiful; even the rotting corpses are seductive.

Her work in this series, some 200 pieces over the past 10 years, is rife with influences. It's a wild-kingdom version of memento mori, the ancient art tradition that reminds us our days on earth are numbered. Also present are the glowing surfaces of Dutch still lifes, the formality of court paintings, and a palpable tenderness that almost, but not quite, spills into Victorian sentimentality.

Breakey says that as a child she regularly rescued wounded birds she found near her home in southern Australia. Now living in the high desert of Tucson, Arizona, where she finds many of her subjects, she still revels in the wildlife that is drawn to her land, where she sees 'the whole food chain in action.'