The Black & White gallery in Chelsea will be showing a three-part program called The Proper Animal this Spring. While I'm not exactly convinced on the quality of the work, I feel that it is my zoo-journalistic duty to inform you, the zoo-enthusiast public, of this possibly zoo-tastic event. The first of three parts looks really dumb, so we'll skip it. Here, in order, are the later 2/3 of the program:
Tamara Kostianovsky: "Actus Reus"
@ Black & White, 4/17 – 5/24
"In her solo debut exhibition, Tamara Kostianovsky extends the cold human gaze to killing. Methodically dissected beef carcasses made out of discarded human clothes are both ethically and aesthetically disturbing. The intense reality of the opened body cannot stop the humans from looking at the killed animal. The looker is not the killer, and some of the power in the relationship therefore lies with the looked-at thing, dead though it is."
Julian Montague: "To Know The Spiders"
@ Black & White, 6/5 – 7/12
"Julian Montague continues his investigations into overlooked realms of daily life. In his highly acclaimed Stray Shopping Cart Identification Project exhibited at the gallery in the fall of 2006, his method was to build a system of classification around a mundane object. In To Know the Spiders, Montague mounts a visual exploration of seemingly mundane animals – the spiders that occupy the peripheries of human architectural space. His process begins with the collection and killing of a spider. He then studies its face under a microscope and from the resulting drawings creates a portrait of the spider in the form of a fabric banner. The banner is then placed and photographed in the exact spot of collection. The banner illuminates the presence of a silent witness and sometime symbiotic partner while also serving as a memorial to the spider that had to die for that understanding to be gained."
The Stray Shopping Cart Identification Project website is kind of fun, too.
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