When you are caught in The Animal Gaze Returned, you will find that the fascination of animal worlds poses conceptual and ethical challenges to human priorities. Artists in this exhibition question the way humans look at animals, how animals return that look, and how this shapes human interactions with them; how people connect, and often don’t connect, with other beings. In The Animal Gaze Returned, contemporary artists extend and complicate traditions in Fine Art by representing animals as more than objects of decoration or status. They use strategies that usurp conventions of anthropomorphic symbolism to recognize that animals’ visual presence — and ability to look — shape and are shaped by a wide variety of media, from painting, video and photography to sculpture and performance.
Artists:
Suky Best, Olivier Richon, Andrea Roe, Bob and Roberta Smith, Rosemarie McGoldrick, Darren Harvey-Regan, Steve Baker, Lucy Powell, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Ian Brown, Aurelia Mihai, Greta Alfaro, Cartwright & Jordan, Kathy High and Edwina Ashton.
Curators:
Chloë Brown, artist, senior lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University,
Rosie McGoldrick, artist, senior lecturer in Fine Art at The CASS, London Metropolitan University and Dr. Robert McKay, writer and lecturer in English Literature at University of Sheffield.