"It's really telling what people go to – whether they think the works are mythical, or futuristic. "Unless we're interested we have no real need to have an incredible knowledge of animals."īlurring the boundaries between animal and human, Clark asks the viewer for an instinctive and primal reaction that says something about our humanity. "It's amazing to me how we have so little knowledge – I can make something and people won't even understand that if it has large horns, it should be the male and I've made it a female," she says. It's also, she says, a comment on how removed we are from nature. ![]() She uses real models for the faces of her sculptures, which include deer, antelope, bears and zebra.Ĭlark says her work, held in private and public collections around the world, and which has even appeared in a Kanye West video clip, is an exploration of both the characteristics that separate us within the animal kingdom, and those that unite us. Using hides rejected by taxidermists and zoos on sculpted foam and clay, Clark creates eerily lifelike hybrids that provoke varying reactions. The exhibition also features, for the first time in Australia, the work of New York-based sculptor Kate Clark her piece Gallant, a suspended "running" deer, is an ethereal synthesis of animal body and human face.Īt first glance Clark's creations look like straightforward taxidermy – until you meet the very human eyes and facial features. (And while this seems preposterous today, there are medical texts from just 130 years ago referencing maternal impression). DeVille's Peter, a taxidermy rabbit placed atop a silver goblet, is coupled with the bizarre story of Mary Toft, an English woman who, in 1726, claimed to have given birth to rabbits.Īt the time, there was a belief that pregnant women who were in the presence of animals could experience what was known as "maternal impression" – giving birth to children bearing the characteristics of those animals. They both celebrate the mythical, but seem almost quaint next to the hyper-real transgenic creations of Patricia Piccinini and Julia DeVille's taxidermy. There are also more classic works by artists like Sidney Nolan and Norman Lindsay, both of whom drew on mythology Lindsay loved nymphs and sirens, while Nolan created an entire series around the myth of Leda and the Swan. Sound artist collective (((20hz))) has created an immersive room allowing viewers to experience some of the sensory information usually only available to animals, and burlesque performer Moira Finucane's multi-sensory installation with artist and symphonic composer Shinjuku Thief wants us to fly: visitors sit in a special chair inside a darkened room, surrounded by feathers, and experience the sensation of flying via a specially-made vibration/light/movement system. My Monster is divided into five ''chapters'' – Xenos (foreigner, stranger) Mythos (stories/tales/narrative) Tokos (childbirth/reproduction) Eros (erotic love) and Kosmos (the world/universe) – and works range from the subtly anthropomorphic imagery of Deborah Klein's insect-women to pieces referencing bioethical debates, like the work of Kira O'Reilly and Jennifer Willet, and biological artist Beth Croce, and British-Indian artist Barthi Kher's hybrid bodies which include women with primate heads, and horse legs. "Her work is a really important extrapolation on ideas of who women are, and what their bodies are – who we are in the animal and non-animal world? Do we breach those boundaries?" The controversial bio-political work won the top prize in the Hybrid art section of the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica, for electronic and interactive art. Several pieces have been created specifically for the show, but Tsitas didn't need to look far for existing works. My Monster features the work of more than 25 Australian and international artists across different media. ![]() Tsitas' research – encompassing literature, film, popular culture, animal and gender studies – wasn't initially conceived as an exhibition, but has slowly become one, "a hybrid like the creatures it celebrates", she says. "He had to be created as an eight-foot tall creature so Dr Frankenstein could actually work on all the minute parts.") ("People don't think that Frankenstein's creature was part animal, but he was equally animal as he was human," says Tsitas. Tsitas is the curator of My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid, a sprawling exhibition based on her doctoral research of the artistic portrayal of the hybrid monster from ancient mythology through to modern biotechnology – and which coincides with the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first fiction novel in which a human-animal hybrid appears, and which ushered in the trope of the mad scientist as a cautionary tale of moral and social responsibility.
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