Curator / Timea Tihanyi

Man and Beast

Jacob Foran
Nidhi Jalan
Jesse Potts
Debbie Reichard
Karolina Sobecka
Timea Tihanyi

November 03 – November 24, 2010
Reception / Thursday, November 04, 6–8pm
Gallery Talk / Saturday, November 06, 2pm

The relationship between humans and our animal companions is intricate. Often, the division between the species is being blurred by affection, need, or habit. Living together, we each acquire traits from one another; develop rituals of interacting and ways of depending on each other. We create chimeras by taking on peculiar characteristics of our totem animals or pet companions, and in turn, we imbue them with our own preferences, emotions, and behaviors. In this co-dependent relationship, we lovingly anthropomorphize the "beast" and metamorphose into one. This show explores the colorful variety of relationships between people and our creature-companions through new media works and tactile sculptures by six artists.

Debbie Reichard comments on our need to redesign and master our environment, replacing the natural with simulacra of the living. Karolina Sobecka's 3D animation sets up a state of endless co-habitation in a rowboat between a person and a creature. Melding the human and the animal into one, Jacob Foran's ceramics and mixed-media dogs are both heroic and broken, mixing the grandeur of the epic with the beauty of the fragile. Timea Tihanyi's video reanimates Socrates in search of answering the true nature of courage. Jesse Potts finds the social behavior of the honeybee analogue to warring humans, in which ways of offense and defense could be both (self-)destructive and sensual. While Nidhi Jalan's chimeras have human features, they are driven by primal emotions of curiosity, need, joy, and fear. Her video, Supper with a Vulture, picks apart and rebuilds relationships between nature and civilization, instinctual and rational, human and animal.