Yesterday Review Magazine Online published a review of our exhibition by Jonah Criswell .
Link to review by Jonah Criswell:
http://ereview.org/2011/06/09/where-the-wild-things-are/
Today is the last day of our show!
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
A review of Calder Kamin’s and Julie Malen’s Urban Still Life
The animal is a meal, a companion, a spectacle, and at times a way of seeing our behavior and ourselves afresh. Urban Still Life is a product of Calder Kamin‘s and Julie Malen’s year-long collaboration, centered on their encounters with animals in an urban environment. From Kamin’s First Approach, a three-foot-tall fox that appears to greet viewers, to the large wall installation Urban Still Life (the show’s title piece), this is an exhibition about the intersection between people and animals. The installation, Urban Still Life (2011), contains 26 ceramic sculptures that correspond to the artists’ encounters with dead animals. The sculptures are grouped based on their cause of death, many of which were the result of human activities. Calder Kamin’s coyote, squirrel, and raccoon are expressively handled which makes their stillness more tragic. Julie Malen’s pigeons and opossum are beautifully realized but lack the warmth that she later finds in her more lyrical and political pieces.
Calder Kamin, “First Approach,” ceramics, 28″ x 10″ x 24″, 2011. Image: photo EG Schempf, courtesy of the artist
The statement regarding the installation and the entire exhibition posits the idea that human experience is not separate from nature. This idea is elaborated upon in both Kamin’s and Malen’s additional works that are free of the strict rule of responding to daily experiences with animals. Kamin’s separate works deliberately involve the viewer, from her First Approach piece to her The Love Seat, a soft white chair with imbedded ceramic dog stomachs and recordings of people playing with their pets. The interactive facets of these works reflect compassion and generosity for the viewer but also for her subject matter, the animal.
Malen’s realizations of bored animals imply something about America we have known for some time, but she uses the animal as a metaphor for our own lazy and savage nature. Her animals are realized with both anxiety and sympathy. Malen’s addition to the installation Urban Still Life felt somewhat analytical and sterile, yet with The Joy in Folly she finds empathy for a culture that cannot respond more responsibly and are trapped in its own circumstance. Either by interactive experience or lyrical use of metaphor, both artists appear determined to make Urban Still Life more than an aesthetic experience for the viewer; however, the work and ideas present don’t require an immature rethinking of our entire society. Being born out of a collaborative urge to document their experiences with animals, Kamin and Malen have tugged at a thread of how humans relate to animals. We see how this relationship can unravel, but they find unexpected routes for us as well.
Calder Kamin, (left) “Animal Graph 1: Texas Tiger Populations,” ceramic, 18″ x 3″ x 6″, 2011, and “Animal Graph 2: Asian Tiger Populations,” ceramic, 18″ x 3″ x 6″, 2011: There are more tigers in captivity in Texas than in the wild in India. Image: photo EG Schempf, courtesy of the artist
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Julie Malen, installation view of “Joy in Folly,” ceramics, 2011. Image: photo Jonah Criswell
In the exhibition Urban Still Life, the animal acts as a means of seeing what we want to see in ourselves and in our culture. Julie Malen finds a culture of death, excess, and, most strikingly, boredom. Her pink pigs stare blankly with ennui, surrounded by the banal and brutal products of a consumer culture. Malen is doing nothing new, but here it feels genuine and without hubris despite her substantial craft. There is a pensive character to her sculpture The Joy in Folly, in which a monkey sits smoking a cigarette on Americana-style diner table. Malen’s animals are subject to a boredom that inspires home-alone puppies to tear up shoes and sofas. Her work seems to beg the question, “What do we do now that we know that we thrive at the cost of others?” Malen’s most ambitious piece, The United States of Happiness, has two melancholic pigs amidst a shattered picnic table. The pig’s faces are both despondent and lazy, which allows the viewer to judge the pigs (a metaphor for ourselves) with compassion. Although her titles, The Joy in Folly and The United States of Happiness, seem a bit too easy, perhaps that melodrama is the point. Perhaps Malen is addressing her own complacency.
Julie Malen, installation view of “The United States of Happiness,” ceramics, wood, mixed media, 2011. Image: photo Jonah Criswell
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Julie Malen, detail of “The United States of Happiness,” ceramics, wood, mixed media, 2011. Image: photo Jonah Criswell
Given that human beings have lived alongside animals for centuries, it may be fair to see animals as companions. Calder Kamin surveys the animal as spectacle and companion. Her The Love Seat is by far the most experimental of the pieces presented in Urban Still Life: a petite plush white loveseat with two imbedded ceramic sculptures of animal stomachs. Viewers are invited to sit and put on fuzzy headphones to listen to recordings of people talking to their pets in a kind of cute gibberish. There is something unsettling in being privy to another person’s disarmed affection to his or her pet. Moreover, the clay animal stomachs (anatomically correct) are cold when they should be warm to the touch. From her First Approach to her pair of tiger sculptures, Animal Graph I: Texas Tiger Population and Animal Graph II: Asian Tiger Populations, Kamin’s work presents the animal as something that needs our care and our compassion. Perhaps it is that we don’t share our affection and compassion for the animal that she is trying to get at with her The Love Seat.
Calder Kamin, detail of “The Love Seat,” mixed media, including ceramics, speakers, 2011. Image: photo Jonah Criswell
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Calder Kamin, installation view of “The Love Seat,” mixed media, including ceramics, speakers, 2011. (“Urban Still Life,” 2011 is visible in the background. Image: photo Jonah Criswell
I agree with Kamin’s and Malen’s assertion that human experience is not separate from nature. However, I do not know what nature is by viewing Urban Still Life. I know that animals are in danger and have been thoroughly dominated by human beings. The fact that we can use animals in the ways Kamin and Malen show us — plaything, companion, spectacle, and metaphor — demonstrates that terms like “animal,” “human,” and, most importantly, “nature” are deeply protean. The artists’ success is that, after viewing Urban Still Life, I know that we need animals. Urban Still Life presents a view of a complicated and deeply compromised relationship between humans and animals in search of nature. Nature is a mystery and it will remain so until we know what is human and what is animal.
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