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A hyena snarls atop a stack of wood beams, and a giraffe hangs by its neck from a ceiling fan at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College.
A huge portrait of a brown bear by L.A. artist Jill Greenberg will soon go on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
Animal imagery is one of the hottest things going in contemporary art.
Certainly it’s a trend among Kansas City artists.
In his recent show at Review Studios Exhibition Space, Davin Watne memorialized his 2006 highway collision with a deer in large paintings and a dramatic installation featuring taxidermy deer and smashed autos.
Life-size deer, fabricated over taxidermy forms, also played a prominent role in a recent installation by Kansas City Art Institute alums Carolyn Hopkins and Stewart Losee at the Fahrenheit Gallery.
Kansas City artist Lee Piechocki attributes the trend to the “global realization that we’ve distanced ourselves from nature, and we need to get back to it.”
Piechocki, an Indiana transplant who recently was awarded an emerging artist studio from the Urban Culture Project, frequently employs animal imagery in his work.
A striking painting portrays a dead deer suspended over a white lab table stocked with plastic containers and other items. It was inspired, he said, by “Dutch still life painting, where you had these big oak tables overflowing with the bounty of the harvest, animals and deer and pelts.”
But the piece is also somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a nod to the trendiness of animal imagery, “not only in the fine arts world but into design and (consumer) products.”
“I use it, but I sort of doubt it,” he says.
Other Kansas City artists leave no doubt about their concern for the fate of animals, but they also use them as a window onto human and environmental concerns.
The dead squirrels she sees regularly on her way to work at Rockhurst University inspired Anne Pearce to create a series of small stain paintings she calls “Squirrel Spirits,” in which the paint seeps like blood across the page.
“My motive really has to do with how careless we are in terms of life,” she said. “Beyond the squirrels, there’s this general glossing over the disposability of life — we’re sending all these people off to war, (we’re killing) the polar bears — because it’s not in our immediate line of sight.”
Locally Pearce was the first to focus on the way area artists use animal imagery in their work. In January 2007 she organized a group show titled “Beasts” at the Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University.
Several months earlier the Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace opened “Cryptozoology,” an international exhibit filled with animal hybrids, mutants and fantasy creatures. The show argued for a serious rethinking of the relationship between humans and nature.
Considering all the pharmaceuticals being flushed into our drinking water and the pesticides applied to many of the foods we eat, it’s not surprising that the mutant theme endures with artists.
Anna Buckthorpe, a senior in the sculpture department at the Kansas City Art Institute, weighed in on the topic with a series of porcelain animal sculptures titled “The Tragic Effects of Thalidomide on the Offspring of Your Pets.”
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