Going Ape: Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art

Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Media Space, Arcade Gallery, First Floor Lobby, Grand Staircase, Third Floor Lobby
September 2, 2006 – January 7, 2007

LINCOLN, MA—Going Ape: Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art is not the only, first, largest, or last exhibition on the theme of animals in contemporary art. Such shows have appeared throughout the country with increasing frequency over the last several years. This trend reflects two complementary phenomena: a growing set of artists who address animal themes in their work, and an avid audience for animal imagery. Everyone seems to be “going ape” for animal art.

This should come as no surprise. The history of art teems with animals, and may indeed have begun with images of beasts painted on the walls and ceilings of caves. Since that time, animals have appeared in the visuals arts in everything ranging from decoration to symbols and allegories. The current interest in animal imagery, as expressed by both artists and viewers, seems intensified by our increasingly uneasy relationships with the natural world and its denizens. Our positions vis-à-vis wild animals are marked by confrontation and confusion. We gaze with wonder at them in the zoo, yet try to avoid them on the street. Meanwhile, our pets are practically people, since we ask them to be life-long companions and child surrogates. People don’t seem to know animals well anymore, or understand what our interactions should or could mean. This anxiety informs most of the artwork in Going Ape as artists try to find ways to figure out what it means to be animal, human, and both simultaneously.

Among the several themes that run throughout this exhibition are a questioning of the age-old wild/tame dichotomy and a confused duality between human/animal. Artists also use animal imagery to express anxiety and guilt about the wide variety of crimes perpetrated against animals and nature by our own species in the name of Science. But not everything is doom and gloom. Many of today’s artists, like artists throughout history, create images of animals to celebrate their sheer beauty of form, shape, surface, and variety, as well as their animating spirits.

So, even though the art in this exhibition is ostensibly about animals, it’s really all about us: what we think and how we feel. We ultimately confront animals to see ourselves.

The following 20 artists/artist teams are featured in Going Ape:

Deborah Brown (New York, NY) oil on canvas – explores the natural world in her paintings to combine her interest in history, science, culture, and education. Brown’s experience walking dogs as a volunteer at the Humane Society of New York inspired her series’ Shelter Dogs and Pound Portraits. These portraits embody Brown’s fondness for animals and, in turn, their fondness for and devotion to us.

Catherine Chalmers (New York, NY) C-prints – in her “Imposters” series, Chalmers plays on our fear and disgust of cockroaches and their ability to survive and evolve despite human efforts to eradicate them. Using cockroaches that she orders through the mail, she stages and photographs fictive scenarios that raise questions about the survival of species, human attempts at domination, genetic engineering, and the relationship between nature and artfulness.

Walton Ford (Southfield, MA) copper plates, hardground etching, aquatint, spit-bite aquating, drypoint, scraping, and burnishing on paper – history is never innocent in the world of Ford’s wildlife watercolors and prints. Executed in the same precise manner of the nineteenth-century naturalist illustrator James John Audubon, his fantastical combination of a historical style with comic or disturbing content makes these works pointed political commentaries about international policies, the environment, and human nature.

James Grashow (Redding, CT) corrugated cardboard sculptures – using one of the most ordinary materials as his primary medium, Grashow created The Great Monkey Project specifically for the Going Ape exhibition. It consists of 100 monkeys which hang from trapezes in a boisterous arrangement in the Museum’s Grand Staircase. Grashow celebrates the zaniness of monkeys at play while recognizing our natural delight in encountering these creatures.

Catherine Hamilton (Providence, RI) ink on paper – captures birds and squirrels in delicate pen drawings that quickly bring to mind Old Master European drawings. By casting such a focused light on these small animals, she warns us of the powerful effect we have on their existence, as we destroy their natural habitats through pollution or force birds and squirrels to adapt to our concrete jungles.

John Harden (Santa Rosa, CA) film on DVD – La vie d’un chien (The Life of a Dog) tells the story of a Parisian scientist who invents a serum which temporarily changes him into a dog and discovers that life as a canine is vastly superior to human existence. In this humorous take on an existential crisis, Harden’s hero attempts to understand his place in this world and in turn expresses the depth of what we mere human beings cannot begin to understand.

Henry Horenstein (Boston, MA) platinum prints – in his Aquatics series, Horenstein photographed sea creatures behind the thick plate glass of aquariums around the world. Shot in black and white film, this series emphasizes abstract composition over the presentation of specific information and underscores the implicit beauty and tenderness of the poetic forms created by animals. These beautiful, organic animal forms, removed from their context, are more likely to be found swimming around in one’s head than behind the glass of an aquarium.

Mary Kenny (Boston, MA) animation and sculptures – has explored the interactions among animals, humans, and their environments by creating tiny sculptures that range from groups of figures to animal heads mounted on the wall like trophies from the hunt. In Kenny’s 2004 video, The Hunt, she animated her human and animal sculptures within a carefully crafted landscape as she depicted a lone man traveling across the Arctic tundra in search of his prey. In her most recent work, Death Down Under, Kenny continues to explore our role amid the cycle of life but in the warmer climate of the Australian bush.

Komar & Melamid (Vitaly Komar, New York, NY and Alex Melamid, New York, NY) video documentary and acrylic on paper – this creative partnership has worked with elephants to produce paintings that simultaneously raise awareness of the plight of the pachyderms and question traditional methods for making art. They went to Thailand in 1997 to begin working with the animals and founded the first of what would become a number of elephant art academies. The animals’ art has been sold in a variety of venues with proceeds benefiting the Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project, a non-profit organization that draws attention to the elephants’ plight and helps facilitate the animals’ survival, it also expands traditional ideas of how art is made and by whom. Watching the elephants paint, the viewer realizes that creativity may not be limited to human beings.

Neeta Madahar (London, England) Iris prints on Velvet paper– is interested in examining the complexities of human domesticity through the behavior of birds. In her Sustenance series, Madahar created documentary images of birds feeding on the balcony of her apartment in suburban Boston. Captured by the artist’s voyeuristic lens at bird feeders as they gather and eat, these birds become metaphors for human behavior. Madahar’s bright flash gives these images a staged, hyper-real appearance, accentuating the landscape as constructed and built by humans in an effort to commune with nature.

Barbara Moody (Beverly, MA) charcoal on paper – creates images in which the position and expression of the animals, coupled with their titles, suggest a human emotion or experience. In using animals as metaphors for human behavior, Moody underlines both the humanity of animals and the wild aspect of people. Riddled with ambiguous narratives, Moody’s drawings are set in dark, monochromatic landscapes that only increase their air of mystery. By telling such enigmatic tales she questions the usefulness of the line usually drawn between the tame and the wild.

Josie Morway (Providence, RI) oil on wood – is a representational painter whose most recent works deal with images of birds. To create these paintings, the artist finds photographs of birds in ornithological reference books and then substantially alters and re-contextualizes them. In this way, the artist concentrates on the gestures and personalities of the birds, as well as their beautiful colors and textures, in a colossal and confrontational format. Thus, what began as an objective representation of a species is transformed into a subjective expression of the emotional power of an individual animal.

Gwynn Murrill (Los Angeles, CA) bronze – drawing on the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s idea of pure realism represented not completely by external form but by essence as well, Murrill conveys a sense of gravity to her animal sculptures by reducing their form to basic elements of shape, mass, volume, surface, and color. Murrill’s Tigers seem ready to leap off their pedestals. As part of the circus, tigers have always represented our awe and wonder of the feral world caught in captivity. In Murrill’s interpretation the activated space between the tigers and their frozen poses suggests our precarious relationship to the animal kingdom.

Frank Noelker (Storrs, CT) C-prints – has been photographing animals in captivity for many years to show how their lives are completely affected by human intervention. His most recent work centers on chimpanzees retired from biomedical research, the entertainment industry, and the pet trade. Noelker visits sanctuaries where the chimps now live a protected life and photographs them in their current situations. Noelker’s powerful and moving portraits raise awareness of the plight of these animals, and will possibly serve as a catalyst for future change.

Barbara Norfleet (Cambridge, MA) C-prints –Norfleet’s Manscape with Beasts series explores the contact zone between animals and humans in intense color photographs taken on Martha’s Vineyard. She depicts animals that have managed to adjust to mankind by living on the margins of our society such as rats, raccoons, gulls, ducks, and skunks. They are not cute and fuzzy, but are instead the hapless victims of the debris-strewn land Norfleet refers to as a “manscape.” The resulting photographs create a dramatic psychological confrontation between man and beast, culture and nature.

Shelley Reed (Boston, MA) oil on canvas – finds her source material in historically obscure paintings, primarily by European artists from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She significantly alters the images in a number of ways: radically enlarging their size, changing details, tweaking compositions, excising irrelevant passages, and draining away color to a palette of black, white, and grays. These changes are made to forefront and intensify the emotional content of the images. Reed’s work celebrates the enduring psychological power of imagery—especially animal imagery—across time, space, and cultures.

Amy Ross (Boston, MA) walnut ink on wall – in her wall drawings sheep bloom from branches and goats peer out of flower buds. While these fantastic images pay homage to nineteenth-century fairy paintings—imagined portraits of the fictional creatures—they are rooted in Biblical references and more recently in contemporary issues of genetic engineering. Merged with plants, these animals are hybrid creatures, as the artist asks, “What would happen if the DNA sequence of a plant or mushroom were spliced with that of an animal?” In her delicate drawings, Ross touches on the complexity of science’s latest intervention with nature. Creeping along the wall in a larger-than-life scale, Ross’s drawing reflects the overwhelming presence of these pressing issues.

Peter Smuts (Los Angeles, CA) C-prints – For the Preservation series, Smuts photographed small toy animals suspended in liquid and trapped in mason jars. These tantalizing pictures tempt us with their commercial candy colored saturation while the “animals” within the glass beseech us with their confrontational gaze. With Preservation, a body of work that explores human conceptions of nature and perception, Smuts creates ambiguity within the image. The large-format of the prints gives these children’s toys monumental status, accentuating their ambiguous nature and questioning how we see, understand, and play with the wild kingdom.

Brad Story (Essex, MA) carved wood, molded Fiberglas with epoxy, thread, acrylic paint, spray lacquers – creates sculptures that dismantle traditional distinctions between animate and inanimate forms. With academic training in art, professional experience as a boat builder, and lifelong interests in flight and birds, Story produces sculpture that draws on many facets of his experiences. This combination of media allows Story to construct translucent and opaque shapes that together allow for a dynamic movement of light through and across the sculpture. Story’s composite sculptures encourage the exploration of overlaps between technology and organic life and ultimately question conventional boundaries.

Kitty Wales (Wrentham, MA) installation with steel and sweaters – Canis Ex Machina provides an intimate look at a domesticated animal, the artist’s dog Tucker. Attached to a mountain of black and white sweaters, Tucker appears to be in charge of a machine that unravels the sweaters to make incarnations of the same dog over and over, alike but different. Echoing distinct anxieties about genetic manipulation and animal breeding, the installation is fraught with ambiguity. In this, Wales reminds us of the complex impact human beings have on nature even in their absence.

Going Ape is curated by Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Curator Nick Capasso, and Dina Deitsch, Curatorial Fellow; along with Curatorial Interns Elizabeth Geissler, Abigail Satinsky, and Katherine Carroll, and Mary Levin and William Koch Curatorial Fellow Lisa Sutcliffe.

Going Ape has been funded by the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation.

For images, please contact Corey Cronin at ccronin@decordova.org or 781/259-3628.

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