Animal

OPENING RECEPTION Thursday 18 October at 8 PM

Animals have always been a significant part of human culture: as adversaries, companions, labourers; as sources of food or clothing; and as signs, symbols or spiritual icons. The meanings we impose on them are so multiplicitous and varied that we often forget that each species is distinct and every animal is an individual. In the catalogue essay for this exhibition, curator Corinna Ghaznavi writes “Animal proposes a variety of ways that we can think about animals through representations. What is the animal? What are the affinities and discrepancies between the species? What kinds of philosophies has the human animal laid onto the natural world, to what end, and to what future? What connections exist in our multiple ways of being?”

Animal includes sculpture, installations, book works, photography and video by artists Lois Andison, Kenn Bass, Dagmar Dahle, Tom Dean, Rebecca Diederichs, John McEwan, Arnaud Maggs, Lyndal Osborne, Su Rynard, and An Whitlock. Many of the works in this exhibition explore our relationship with animals as the embodiment of the natural, uncultivated realm, subjected to the scientific methodologies of field observation, specimen collecting and classification (taming, and claiming, by naming)—and experimentation. Other works challenge us to consider the Animal itself as the non-human “other”, with abilities and attributes that instill in us feelings of fear, wonder, loathing, and apathy or ambivalence, and what we do to, and for, each other as we ‘share’ the natural and human environments and impose an evolutionary-based hierarchy of value and worth.

As an exhibition, these “animals” are cultural constructions encountered in an art gallery, and unlike the real thing in its natural habitat, are mediated, interpreted and re-presented by humans, for humans. The animal/human and nature/culture distinctions and affinities explored here reveal something about both ourselves and the world we inhabit—human and non-human animals alike.