The insistent gaze of these animal heads has an obsessive, almost hallucinatory quality. Perhaps it’s the isolation of each from the context of either a setting or even body. Or perhaps it’s the strangeness of depicting animal subjects in the genre of portraiture, blurring the line between individual and type.
Lee Deigaard’s nighttime photograph of a staring raccoon, its eyes two blank circles of reflected light, titled What’s Going to Happen? is a kind of animal film noir image, charged with anxiety; the animal looks both vulnerable and threatening, blinded and inscrutable. Catherine Chalmers has contributed a Cibachrome print of a cheery red tomato in which a large, chomping caterpillar burrows. Chalmers is a kind of amateur zoologist, raising insects in her New York City apartment and then observing their behavior. Chalmers’ seven-minute video, titled Safari, depicts what happens when a bunch of cockroaches are set loose in a jungle setting.
Jan Harrison’s sprawling, meat-hued ceramic cat, memorably titled I Am Happy with Teeth and Claws, expresses a joyful abandon that is both appealing and disturbing: Does it represent the beast in us, or suggest that there’s a portion of the beast that’s like us? Christie Rupp’s sculpture of a great auk – a flightless bird from the Far North that became extinct in the mid-19th century – resembles the handful of priceless actual auk skeletons squirreled away in natural history collections, except that it’s constructed of fast-food chicken bones. This simulacrum of a specimen, created from the bones of a bird whose species has met the opposite fate – extreme plenitude thanks to its commodification – is imbued with irony as well as pathos.
Henry, a freelance curator based in Woodstock and retired professor specializing in modern and contemporary art at Drew University, said that she has long been interested in “nature-based art, from referential to abstract. It’s about seeing that kind of life presence, the life energy, nature’s vastness and force and the human relation to it.” Henry characterized the work in the Woodstock exhibition as cutting-edge, given the usual cynical, exploitative stuff related to animals that still prevails – or did until very recently – at top galleries and museums.
When she took her students on gallery tours of New York City in the 1990s and early 2000s, Henry “was shocked at the depiction of animals that had been used and misused,” Damien Hirst’s cross-sections of cows and sheep taking the cake. “Usually, it was a male artist acting out,” she said, noting that in “The Animals Look Back at Us,” all but two of the artists are female.
Harrison – who also has contributed two pastels, each depicting an animal gazing directly at the viewer – said that the images are about more than meets the eye. “These beings want us to hear and see them,” she said. “They want us to communicate with them. Animals are emissaries for nature, and they’re pleading with us to please to get back to that point where we have a connection again. They are really insistent now.”
“The Animals Look Back at Us” will be on display at the Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts from February 23 to March 24, with an opening reception on February 23 from 4 to 6 p.m. A talk with local naturalist Spider Barbour, “Introducing the Animals We Live With,” is scheduled for March 23 from 3 to 4:40 p.m. The artists are Terri Amig, Catherine Chalmers, Sue Coe, Lee Deigaard, Mary Frank, Jan Harrison, Gillian Jagger, Isabella Kirkland, David Marell, Gwynn Murrill, Christy Rupp, Janice Tieken and Eva van Rijn. An expanded version of the show will be on display at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn from September 21 through October 20.
“The Animals Look Back at Us” opening Saturday, February 23, 4-6 p.m., through March 24, Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker Street, Woodstock; (845) 679-2079; www.byrdcliffe.org.
