New Zealand artist to exhibit rotting animal

August 25 2005

New Zealand artist to exhibit "skinned & rotting" animal sculptures in US Animal Nature exhibition

PITTSBURGH, U.S.—The Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Purnell Centre for the Arts at Carnegie Mellon University is pleased to announce the exhibition, Animal Nature, August 26 - October 2, 2005.

The Miller Gallery organized and co-curated Animal Nature with artists Lane Hall and Lisa Moline from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

New Zealand artist Angela Singer, the only NZ artist in the exhibition, will exhibit a life sized sculpture of a skinned rotting trophy boar head and a wall sculpture of tiny "bloody flesh" animal heads. Singer works predominately with donated old trophy kill taxidermy that she recycles, often stripping back the skin to the inner taxidermic foam support that she carves, modeling a new "bloody flesh" from wax and/or paint. Working with the history of each particular animal, she aims to recreate something of its "death by hunt."

Steve Baker, also taking part in Animal Nature, has written about Angela Singer's work in a new book (unrelated to this exhibiton), titled Killing Animals.

Animal Nature is an exhibition that developed out of an ongoing, expanding web-project entitled Criminal Animal found at http://www.criminalanimal.org. The exhibition, catalogue and related projects are unconventional in their approach. The undertaking brings together artists from around the globe with scholars and critics who all are engaged in investigations of “the animal” in one way or another. Rather than positing a tight thesis, this exhibition-as-experiment contains diverse responses to open-ended questions.

The animal and animal-body have long been sites of controversial research – medical studies, pharmaceutical investigations, and consumer product testing, to name a few. Animal Nature focuses on a different kind of research: poetic, empathic, personal, semiotic, formal.

Ours is a project designed to be deliberately experimental, provocative, relevant, expressive, intellectually engaging and truly interdisciplinary. It features the work of Steve Baker and Edwina Ashton, Catherine Chalmers, Jim Duesing and Jessica Hodgins, Lane Hall and Lisa Moline, Andrew Johnson, Eduardo Kac, Dorijan Kolundzija, Lyne Lapointe, Per Maning, Olly and Suzi, Michael Pestel, Nigel Rothfels, Angela Singer, and Stephen Wilson. More about the participants may be found at http://www.cmu.edu/millergallery.

A full-color catalogue produced by the Miller Gallery will also be available. It features an essay by Steve Baker, author of The Postmodern Animal, along with entries by Lane Hall, and Jenny Strayer, Director of the Miller Gallery.

ENDS

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