Animals Across Discipline, Time & Space
Essays and exhibition catalog, McMaster Museum of Art, January 2020
Kathryn Eddy, The Urban Wild Coyote Project
Colleen Plumb, Animals Are Outside Today
Derek Jenkins, Livestock
Mary Anne Barkhouse, Red Rover
Erica Gajewski, Mercury, Water, PCB, DDT
McMaster Museum of Art, 2 January 2020
Tracy McDonald (photo), featuring work by Mary Anne Barkhouse (roof) and Colleen Plumb (poster)
What are the responsibilities of art? Can it be true that art has no responsibilities except to itself? What about when art is made out of the bodies of murdered animals or trees? … What artist, without breaking their own heart, could consider never making art again?
The relationships between human and nonhuman animals have always been at the heart of our existence. Notions of human superiority, reinforced in the age of enlightenment, have played a fundamental role in where we find ourselves in the 21st century: deep in the human-created catastrophe of the Anthropocene.
Curated by Tracy McDonald, Animals Across Discipline, Time & Space brings together work by five artists who explore the nonhuman. The exhibition includes sculptural installations inside and outside of the museum by Mary Anne Barkhouse (Nimpkish tribe, Kwakiutl Nation), the interactive Urban Wild Coyote Project installation by Kathryn Eddy (American), large scale drawings by Erica Gajewski (Canadian), a film installation by Hamilton-based artist Derek Jenkins (American) and selected photographs by Colleen Plumb (American) from her series Animals Are Outside Today.