St-Laurent setting up works by an elephant and turtle ( Photo: Christopher King )
At the premiere of the gallery show that will exhibit samples of his work, Tillamook Cheddar will make a special appearance, cavorting with fans of her work.
F. Bowman Hastie III will probably be nearby, on-site to answer questions about Cheddar’s work. Don’t expect Cheddar to open up about it herself.
Artist eccentricity? It probably has more to do with the fact that Hastie is Cheddar’s owner and that Cheddar is a Jack Russell terrier.
Yes, SAW Art Gallery on Nicholas Street has gone to the dogs . . . and cats and elephants and tortoises.
The gallery’s newest exhibit, opening Aug. 1, is called Animal House: Works of Art Made by Animals.
The exhibit is the brainchild of gallery curator Stefan St-Laurent, whose personal interest in “animal art,” as he calls it, led to the discovery that formal research of the subject was limited.
once St-Laurent started conducting that research himself, he found that animal art is much more complex than elephants brandishing paintbrushes with their tusks to produce one-of-a-kinds for zoo gift shops.
“The preconceptions I had about animal art were shattered,” he said.
“There’s so much misinformation about animal art that’s available to the general public that people have a romanticized idea of what animal art is all about. [Some] animals are exploited all day long to produce. Not much has changed from a circus.”
But that’s just one type of animal art, said St-Laurent. He calls it typical or exploitative animal art, meaning that the animal artist is forced to produce artwork, usually for commercial means, under the direction of people.
That doesn’t mean that these works can’t be beautiful. The swirls of colour in a painting made by a tortoise traipsing across a paint-smeared canvas, for example, is oddly compelling.
He distinguishes those sorts of practices from animal creativity in the wild – represented in the exhibit by the huge swallow’s nests, recreated by local artists, that hang from the gallery’s ceilings, encroaching on the exhibit’s manufactured pieces – and collaborative or relational animal art, where human artists and their pets work together to create.
That’s how Cheddar works. One piece depicts his owner’s painted representations of the American flag, gnawed and scratched at by Cheddar.
Well-known American performance artist Carolee Schneemann produced an entire series of photographs with her cat, Kitch. They feature her and Kitch in a series of Harlequinesque poses, playing off the animal’s tendency to mug for the camera.
St-Laurent said that it’s in these environments, when working closely with human artists who treat them respectively, that animals can cultivate creativity and talent.
“[Animals] that have this access to artist material and living with artists tend to become creative in their own way. But it has to be a long process.”
The gallery exhibit is meant for everyone, and St-Laurent hopes that it will allow visitors to re-evaluate their relationship to and treatment of the animal world. But he cautions against viewing the exhibit with a human perspective.
“Our relationship with animals today is so strained that animal abuse is going on a scale that we’ve never seen before on planet earth,” he said. “
The industrialization of meat production, all these things, have made a lot of people disconnected with the animal world and the only way we can appreciate it is by humanizing them. If the only way to connect now with the animal world is to force them to paint like humans and project on to them human qualities, it’s very bizarre and a dysfunctional relationship. Me, what I’m more interested in is ‘how do we figure out why they’re making these aesthetic choices?’”
The exhibit will show through September.