Flock and Fable: Animals and Identity in Contemporary Art
By Francesca Rascazzo
Myths, symbols and modern fables are mirrors of human behavior in the works of twelve artists at the Chelsea Art Museum. Works of flocks of animals or lonely beasts explore and investigate the different forms of human identity. The exhibition invites the viewers to discover their feelings and emotions, to identify themselves with the human-animal hybrids, distorted creatures, swarms, herds in the paintings. The well-known literary method of comparing men and animals had interested the work of many writers and artist in ancient times, as we share with all the other forms of life on the earth the unavoidable destiny of death, the ephemeral condition of existence, and the advantages and disadvantages that come from living in relation to others, in society and the universe at large. This is probably the main reason for discovering our condition in their image, for seeing ourselves from an external point of view.
This modern bestiary shows how racial, sexual, spiritual, social, political, psychological and moral stereotypes can be printed in images and illustrations of animals, real and fantastic, and deduced from popular culture, literature and Judeo- Christian moral. In the provocative silhouettes of the cut-paper piece by Kara Walker, the image of the hybrid “black woman-black sheet” symbolizes the stereotype of racial taboos. As in many of her no-medium works, mostly based on the historical realism of slavery, in this seductive and submissive figure the artist reveals the colonial myths depicting the sexuality of black women as animalistic.
Sexual identity is also explored in the work of Marc Swanson. In order to express his politically conservative background and his own homosexuality he covered two stag heads, notable symbols of masculinity, in rhinestones.
In the torch drawing by Helen Altman it’s easy to characterize some aspects of the emotional and psychological human identity. Far from his flock, isolated and lonely, her elephant evokes compassion, sympathy and fear. He probably reminds every viewer of a similar condition in everyone’s life and creates an empathetic relation between the viewers and the artist.
Showing and sharing emotional identities is also the effect of Kojo Griffin’s piece. In the ever-unhappy social relations among the animal-headed figures represented in his translucent Japanese paper collages the artist describes scenes of humiliation and anxiety. He “scratches the surface of societal scabs, making do with the puss or what is often left out of the fictions: shame, impotence, cruelty, hysteria, rage, failure, hostility, fear and the abject.”
Religious and spiritual identity is explored in the works of Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Graciela Iturbide and Kimowan Mclain. In The Speed of Your tongue/ Faith and Politics, Patricia Bellan-Gillen used various animal symbols and icons from different religions and assembles them in a work that invites the viewers to search and find their own spirituality. Flocks of locusts and birds are presented as mythical human spirits in the work of Graciela Inturbide, who declares: “I testify the poetic dimension of man and magic, and I see a kind of mystic in the every day life.” Religious and spiritual meanings are also the interests of the thin, swaying paper walls filled with images of moths by Kimowa Mclain. In Map of Moths, the artist chose the biblical metaphors for the ephemeral as symbols of our temporary existence. Like Icarus, the floating wedding gowned woman in the work of Rosemary Laing followed everyone’s dream to fly. And, like the myth, she is falling down, shot by bullets.
Finally, political truths are clear in the fables of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger and Andrew Johnson: Both express their disagreement with America’s foreign policy. The first one uses image of Chernobyl insects suffering numerous mutations from the effects of radiation in their environment. The enormously bloated frog represented in The Closed Mouth by Andrew Johnson is a clear allegory of consumption.
