June 22, 2006
Lions and Tigers and Embroidery, Oh My

If the heat and dung aura of the National Zoo is keeping you away from its fated elephants and panda parties, there's a better venue out there — this one offering delicious A/C and, for the right price, the option to take home some cuddly animals. Irvine Contemporary's new show Animalia gives us bears, lizards, and giraffes, in one of those nice clean galleries to boot.

Contemporary aesthetics of cutesy things aside, this show is a solid one. Curated by Heather Russell, 22 artists were corralled into one gallery with a very long lasso. You've got video, photography, painting, and at the very literal end, a taxidermied deer. With so many artists and egos, it's asking to bound out of control, spilling onto 14th street. And that's what makes the show hold fast.

Entering the gallery you'll find Josh Levine's fiberboard and foam creatures; one hangs on three arms leering at you from someplace in between Labryrinth and a petting zoo. His two sculptures are seeking an environment in the gallery, one drinking gold broth from a still fountain, and seem apt to charge out onto the street to harass passersby.

Peregine Honig, Orly Cogan and Carlee Fernandez question the animal itself with mythological odes to the satyr, the bear, and the giraffe. While Honig's man-lion is fairly traditional in a doth-quote-the-art-historian way, Cogan and Fernandez mystify. The former embroiders on painted cloth to catch a child's blanket osmosis of a freak show carnival. The resulting piece is, dare-I-say, playful as a kitten, a shock for any object with full-frontal nudity.

Fernandez digs herself in to the mythology. She said that she once wondered how much of her would fit inside her pet German Shepard's body. The series of work surrounding her photograph Bear Head Study (pictured) explores that question by sending Fernandez inside a taxidermied bear. The self-portrait gives us a big ol' bear head mounted on what would be just another risqué MySpace photo.

If there's something unnerving about the show, it's that this group of young artists seems to have no human fear of these animals. Whether erased by lives lived in the city or Animal Planet binges, the work here is never ferocious, never even dangerous. And at its creepiest, the animals are indifferent, as in Everything tastes better when you are blind, Adam Stennett's video of a formal dinner overrun by dozens of mice. They're everywhere, clinging to raised spoons and falling into dresses, but they (both the diners and the mice) fail to notice each other. The creepy scene even teeters towards funny, with a steady calm heartbeat soundtrack heard throughout the gallery that maybe naively sets the tone for the show — that there's nothing beyond these creatures other than the fluffy and the furry.

Irvine Contemporary is located at 1412 14th Street, NW and open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Animalia runs until July 29th.

Source: Parsons, Adrian, Lions and Tigers and Embroidery, Oh My, DCist, Art, June 22, 2006