S4 / Saturday, November 20, 2010

TELEGRAPHJOURNAL.COM

salonfocus

TELEGRAPHJOURNAL.COM

Saturday, November 20, 2010 / S5

Fredericton artist WhiteFeathers 2010 found/mixed-media Homme Fatale.

Photo: Submitted

David Altmejds 2009 Sobey Art Award-winning piece The Settler, 2005. Wood, paint, Plexiglas, mirror, foam, resin, synthetic hair, lighting system, shoes, wire, moulding clay, beads, glitter and glue. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York David Altmejd. Photo: Steve farmer/Submitted

A work from David R. Harpers series-in-progress. The artist is embroidering over old Dutch still-life reproductions to remove the Memento Mori. Photo: Submitted

Janice Wright Cheney in her home studio in Fredericton with her dog, Daisy, and velvet-covered prototype for Coy Wolves. Photo: david Smith/for the telegraPh-Journal

Two Lionesses Attacking a Young Stag by Flemish painter Frans Snyders (1579-1657). Gift of The Second Beaverbrook Foundation. Photo: Submitted

A video still from Duke and Battersbys 2008 work Beauty Plus Pity.
Photo: Submitted

The 20th century was a time of rapid urbanization, pushing wild animals from our life. Now, the animals are returning to galleries in cities across the globe thanks to a growing number of fauna-friendly artists. Story by Mike Landry
The lights are dimmed, doors locked and the New Brunswick Museum grows quiet. Then things come alive. Coy wolves rip into archived boxes of bone. A giant squid wisps along the walls of the Hall of Great Whales. Silk worms go to work on ornate Victorian artifacts. Fleas flick about, hungry. Rats scurry around the Industry Gallery. If this were Disney, this would be true. Still, its easy to imagine such as scene after seeing Fredericton artist Janice Wright Cheneys exhibition Trespass, on display at the museum. Wright Cheneys creatures sculptural works using a variety of textiles appear frozen in movement, waiting for you to turn your back. The apparent false-frigidity of Wright Cheneys work is a metaphor for the museum environment. Contrary to its wellcurated displays, behind the scenes the institution buzzes with research activity. Mention the museums bug barn a space where bugs are kept to clean bones and Wright Cheneys eyes go wide with excitement. She worked with the museums zoology department as part of Trespass to conceive her latest work, Coy Wolves. Wright Cheney has bridged the gap between science and art for the past decade. Diagramming pinning, controlling, classifying ... thats sort of a bizarre idea, Wright Cheney says over tea in her kitchen while her dog Daisy plays under her feet.I love museums, but they give you this sense of safety, that everything can be known. Debunking the myth of the museum has become quite the theme in contemporary art. A curious amount of artists are using animals as their subject matter. Animals are so de rigueur, C Magazine, an international contemporary art magazine published out of Toronto, dedicated its Autumn 2010 issue to animals. Its an international trend, but Canadian artists seem particularly fond of animals. Last years winner of the Sobey Art Award, David Altmejd, is renowned for his animal sculptures bursting with crystalline mirrors. Of course, nature has a long history in Canadian culture, but todays approach is quite different. The 2008 exhibition Exalted Beings: Animal Relationships, curated by Peter Dykhuis for Halifaxs Dalhousie Art Gallery, defined this modern take as not the representation of the animal per se, but the relationship between animal and the human in a postmodern context. Grappling with failing ideas of economy, religion and environment, the great modernism of the 20th century has become, in many ways, disastrous. But why are artists turning to the animal to deal with these contemporary concerns? Wright Cheneys Coy Wolves addresses the danger of a cunning animal in disguise. The comparisons to humanity are easy. Coy Wolves developed after learning from New Brunswick Museum staff that the Eastern coyote is a result of coyote/wolf breeding. The wolf, long-believed vanished from the region, is back in coyotes clothing. Terry Graff, curator and deputy director of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, has long thought similarly of the duck and duck decoys. The duck, with its versatility, is a stand-in for humans. The decoy, with its trickery, is a stand-in for art. Hes been working with the theme since the 70s. On Sat. Nov. 27, animals will take over the Beaverbrook. In conjunction with London, Ont. artist Tom Benners Call of the Wild exhibition, Graff has organized Animal Kingdom with works from the gallerys collection. Even though its going to be hung over Christmas, there are some frightening scenes, Graff says.Its not exactly Bambi. [Concentrating on animals] gets one thinking about cultural institutions, because, really, they all are anthropocentric they glorify human culture. As his more than 30 years of work in the area attests, exploring our relationship to the animal is not a new idea. We just started to finally pay attention to it. We live in an ecological system and were dependant on other species for our own survival. Through our human-centredness weve destroyed much of the animal kingdom and diminished ourselves.

Wild things

Some of Janice Wright Cheneys recycled fur, felted wool and horsehair Rats. An ongoing series. Photo: Submitted

It gets one thInkIng about cultural InstItutIons, because, really, they all are anthropocentrIc they glorIfy human culture.
Terry Graff

Corinna Ghaznavi is in her fourth year of a doctorate in the visual arts, working with animals and representation at the University of Western Ontario. She sees the recent focus as stemming from neo-Darwinism rethinking evolution as animals not being different in kind, but different in degrees from humans. A hundred years from now animals will be situated differently. Were starting to figure out we need polar bears in the North Pole, Ghaznavi says.Moving into the future we need to reconsider animals differently. Ghaznavi believes we can represent animal as they truly are, especially with sculpture and installation, which gives the visceral feeling of a living being in the gallery. Its a space-disrupting new narrative. Wright Cheney began using animal imagery back when she was still painting, working on a series about superstition and fears.Its a current she never really left. Wright Cheney works with animals,because theyre living, breathing and doing their best, too, with the mess the world is. Inspired by her influential East Coast textile artist friend Sarah Maloney, Wright Cheney started experimenting with textiles, embroidering a little black insect. It was quite bad ... I wasnt the sort of young girl who sat at my grandmothers knee and embroidered pillowcases. But she was satisfied with the finished piece. It had a physical presence. Unlike in paint, these creatures came to life. She found her muses in the backyard, and embroidered them to scale. Still identifying as a painter, Wright Cheney was slow to embrace sculpture at first just exhibiting her insects in drawers and boxes. She hasnt embroidered recently. Its a departure concurrent with her growing comfort with sculpture. Trespass features the large sculptures in Coy Wolves in one room and spreads Wright Cheneys older work throughout the museum, turning the entire space into one large piece. Emerging artist David R. Harper, from Halifax, also combines a love of textiles with sculpture and animal subject matter. Harper has exhibited nationally and is finishing a masters degree at the Art Institute of Chicago. His six-month exhibition Skin & Bone this year at the Textile Museum of Canada was filled with embroidered animals, but hes becoming more comfortable with just implying the animal. He says the change has nothing to do with moving out of Canada. A lot of the connectivity to the animal comes with a personal place that we carry with us all the time ... Ill always have the connection that I need, Harper says.I use the animal form a lot to reference cultures of nature. Theres this idea of longing, loss and kind of celebration of ritual. It seems strange to celebrate, but we all do. His restraint (in recent work hes worked primarily in white) comes from a

St. Johns painter Helen Gregorys 2009 acrylic on canvas Eskimo Curlew. concern in the ease of using animals. As long as people are questioning why theyre doing it then I think its going to be a wonderful way to make artwork. If it becomes a novelty, were screwed. Wright Cheney hasnt stopped questioning her subject matter. In the past decade, shes moved from insects to moths, invertebrates to now mammals. But shes not just ticking off a list. Her work-in-progress, Rats, will take years. She plans on making hundreds of the creatures out of old furs. Im interested in the tension that occurs when certain species come too close to humans, so we then try even more to control them. Rats are obvious because they are so successful where humans are, she says. In Bodice of Fleas, she similarly addresses humanitys cohabitation with the wild. I like to look at the less-pleasing aspects of animal activity and think about how actually productive and meaningful they are. This biodiversity is encompassed with the re-contextualization initiated with Trespass. Both her own and the museums works shake their former trappings of organization and categorization. Her work, like her animals, is transgressing. Helen Gregory, a St. Johns-based painter, has been focusing on how artists interact with museum collections for the past four years for her masters degree. Its something she does in her own practice, and is very popular in the UK. She believes the interest in animals isnt about the creature, but is a by-product of

our compulsion to order and collect. The museum manifests this on a grand scale. While shes certain about this desire, shes not sure whether theres any truth to the order we impose. She wants to find the boundary where what we impose and what nature reveals meet. She believes having artists work with museum collections could help find that line byshaking things up a little bit. Wright Cheney may question the animal/ human relationship, but, like Gregory, she loves order. Her small studio, in a bedroom on the top-floor of her home, is well-organized. Small boxes are neatly labelled owl, hawk and rat,indicating the bones inside. I love order. I admire it. It just seems like something to aspire to ultimate tidiness, she says.[At the New Brunswick Museum] there were all these shrews and voles lined up with little tags. Theres something sweet and heart-wrenching about it. Its all these little deaths. Its beautiful. Wright Cheneys visited natural history collections and worked with scientists the world over. She even put her hand into a decaying animal to feel the heat of a maggot mass. Im not much for gore. I am quite squeamish. You can ask my children. If they cut themselves I cant help them ... But I do like something about the dark side of things that make us uncomfortable. In his essay for Trespass, curator Peter Larocque suggests artists, in exploring the uncomfortable, bring new ways of seeing to

nature. To exemplify this relationship she recounts the horror she and Battersby felt after they had their kitten mounted. Its like a dark shadow of its former self, Vey Duke says. For our generation the idea of nature, and especially mammalian nature, is inextricably bound up in a sense of loss. While Duke and Battersby narrate our changing relationship, Fredericton artist WhiteFeather doesnt believe weve made the postmodern move. Like Harper, she works with animals and is pursuing a masters degree at the Art Institute of Chicago. My work is a rejection of medical/scientific and religious sterility and coldness, and an embrace of all the messy, ugly, problematic and quintessentially alive things in the world, WhiteFeather writes from Chicago. Ethics and morals arent a direct goal of WhiteFeathers work. The grotesqueness in my work is mostly to emphasize the fantastically gritty state of being alive. The viewer always plays a role in the artwork, and I intentionally orchestrate the kind of relationship I want to invoke - one of a gut reaction, of an amplified uncanny experience, so that the viewer becomes more introspective, more conscious of their own body, mortality and psyche while also having the option of rejecting what they see and redefining themselves through that rejection. The viewer plays a crucial part in Trespass, too. Scattering the work among the collec-

a hundred years from now animals will be situated differently. were starting to figure out we need polar bears in the north pole.
corinna ghaznavi

there were all these shrews and voles lined up with little tags. theres something sweet and heart-wrenching about it. its all these little deaths. its beautiful.
Janice Wright cheney

the data. But more than a paradigm shift, Wright Cheney says artists like herself are suggesting theres more than one way of seeing. Caught between unknowing and our preference for absolutes, we are like Wright Cheneys coy wolves -- interlopers caught between two worlds. Former Halifax, now New York Statebased, art-duo Duke and Battersby approach this interloper through love-story narratives. Lesser Apes, a work-in-progress and part of an installation short-listed for this years Sobey Art Award, is about a love affair between a female woman and a female bonobo. In the piece the narrator concedes it might make people feel pushed past whats safe. Love can be just as wild and unknown as the natural world. Emily Vey Duke says the work is about nature and our desire. Whether theyre working with hunters or perverts, Duke and Battersby explore the ramifications of our current and future relationships with

tion makes the viewer work. Over the past 10 years, Wright Cheneys gained artistic confidence. Ambiguity is allowable, letting the viewer react instead of receive. Im allowing something a bit more poetic or open-ended to occur, she says. With Trespass, Wright Cheneys theory and practice are one. Shes found a balance between knowledge and the unknown. Like the animal, the artist can bridge the wild and ordering poles of the human condition. Perhaps its this identification with the animal that is propelling contemporary arts fascination with fauna. I reject the idea of moving without thinking ... Whatever youre doing, be aware that youre on this planet and theres this beauty. Its not always pretty but its real. Theres something raw and real about being alive every day. s Mike Landry is arts and culture editor at the Telegraph-Journal. He can be reached at landry.michael@telegraphjournal.com.