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Other As Animal |
Press Release |
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Other As Animal
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The impulse for this exhibition was to select work that is engaged not only in depictions of animals, however fascinating, culturally analogous, or symbolic, but rather in an attempt to express something about animal consciousness. I began looking for art that represented another way of appreciating animals and what happens when we find ourselves, while projecting onto them, somehow aligned with their powerfully distant yet familiar-seeming natures. I first began thinking about this from looking at Lucy Winton and Jill Musnicki’s paintings. I didn’t feel in either case that I was looking at an artist expressing only herself, but rather at an intersection of consciousness, something that could be iterated and felt but not easily explained, something the art itself reified. And in beginning to try to find more examples of artists whose work might have similar power, I remembered Ted Hughes’s poem The Jaguar:
There is an immensity in this description quite different from the intimacy of Winton or Musnicki’s work, but the impulse is the same, that urge to locate the self in another self, the Other. Winton’s work generates such strange mystery, and such peculiar completeness, that it made me rethink notions of how nature is outside ourselves. Her monkey lives in the shadow of our conscious selves. Musnicki’s bees are complete and sensuous, somehow intimate and remote at once, and arouse the sensation of deep space or the deep sea; mortality as a beautiful abyss. Eric Fischl’s painting of mortality can be seen to be a pivot for this show, and an oddity in that it includes a human, but the bullfighter’s presence is so dwarfed by the immense pain and pathos of the bull’s state and its posture that it is the bull, the bull, the bull that we feel. It has an emotional gravitational force that stuns the rest of the elements of the painting. In Winter Pollen, Hughes wrote about ....the vital, somewhat terrible spirit of natural life... Even when it is poisoned to the point of death, its efforts to be itself are new in every second. Animals behaving in their own complete worlds can be seen in all the work in this exhibition, but there is a certain extreme of indifference or otherness in birds that clearly compels many artists. We all know that birds are smarter than humans used to think, and their aerial worlds defy us with greater ease than those of many other creatures. Ross Bleckner’s world of birds is just that, birds and paint becoming indissoluble and absolutely matter-of-fact, like imagining a soul. Similarly, Catherine Howe’s gigantic hummingbird forms and dissolves its own space and presence via the absolute of painterliness. In both Bleckner and Howe’s work the world becomes a singularity of flight and motion and stopped time. Shelly Reed’s and Julie Heffernan’s birds are the opposite, and these two artists’ paintings also define an opposite edge of the intent of this exhibition, in a sense, since their paintings are like looking into whole bird-based civilizations. Diane Andrews Hall’s robin and Jean Pagliuso’s chickens face us off, cocky and alert, confrontationally and stubbornly Other, and yet completely familiar. Amy Ross’s jays, one of which is part magnolia bud, interact obliviously. Then there is Jane Rosen’s goshawk, a monument to the inscrutability of wildness. Painting or sculpting one thing in space always gives the viewer a particular option of more intimate interaction, and so it is with Simen Johan’s sheep, John O’Reilly’s dog, and Daisy Youngblood’s donkey. We can circle them, as it were, working out their distance from us, crossing it, re-establishing it, feeling it dissolve. As Johan’s sheep looks back at me I feel, oddly, that I become it for a moment. It’s utterly matter-of-fact, and yet it feels like a portal to an entire other universe. O’Reilly’s dog leads to a potent sense of vulnerability, and there is something perilous about crossing our distance from her. Youngblood’s donkey is quiet, so quiet and self-contained. And then there’s Ebie White, Erick Swenson’s perfectly suspended moment of cross-species reality, staring down our separateness in its singularity. Sally Gall’s snail and spider, and their happenstancical duet, take us to the lighter-than-air worlds that stitch us to the earth. Cartoons have always been abundantly populated by animals. Most of us, as children, have learned about morality, and sociability, and a sense of joy and humor, from them. Both Shawn Spencer and David Humphrey’s paintings, witty as they are, also grip by wonder and fantasy, and provide another edge in this exhibition, a kind of disquiet that, while humorous, is still haunting. And so animals abide with us. They are like us. They are sentient, have emotions, feel pain, stare back. Depictions of animals behaving in their realms can be fun, curious, familiar, frightening, but what most interests me in curating this show is art that crosses the divide between ourselves and animals, that tries to enter their territory as the Other, their imagined consciousness. For an artist, the impulse to attempt this projection is easy. Artists always make the world theirs. Art, and artists, anthropomorphize everything. This impulse in the observation of animals has been condemned by science (although that’s fast changing), but it is the foundation of empathy, arguably our greatest attribute. There’s no question that we’re smarter than animals, by almost every intellectual measure. On the other hand, animals still have, and represent, that which is most critical in us, our emotional selves, our persevering selves. I thank the artists in this show who celebrate that. – April Gornik, May 2010 |
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