The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (KMAC) presents Second Life, the Summer exhibition featuring taxidermy and other uses of the vestiges of animate beings. Second Life is curated by Joey Yates and on view from Saturday, June 14 through August 31, 2014.

Animals, like humans, leave traces such as footprints and varying scents. They shed hair and skin and leave their mark wherever they go. Despite these similarities, humans have developed a hierarchy that classifies the animal body with a different set of aesthetic and ethical dimensions. Through a particular combination of art works and craft traditions that examine the ongoing shifts in animal-human relations the Second Life exhibition will consider various historical and contemporary approaches for reconciling human estrangement from the animal, and equally the natural world.

photo kmacmuseum.org

For over 40,000 years, as the earliest cave paintings indicate, the non-human animal has functioned as a primary source for artistic visions that help mediate our understanding of the surrounding nature as well as ourselves. Combining ceramics, collage, design, installation, painting, photography, sculpture and video with taxidermy and other uses of the vestiges of animate beings, Second Life will present artistic interventions that disrupt our expectations of animal identity and illuminate the current role that animals play in contemporary art and craft practice. The show connects the use of ornithological practices in the work of 19th century painter John James Audubon with the subsequent work of contemporary artists who engage in practices that destabilize our relationship with nature. Knowledge of science and anatomy are employed in order to address the themes of control, preservation and survival.

photo kmacmuseum.org

In the context of this show Second Life refers to the use of the animal body as a ready-made. The work on view points to areas of creative expression where science and art, biology, anatomy, technology and craft all converge, leading to artistic practices that frame the animal in new contexts. KMAC’s exhibition borrows its name from the online virtual world Second Life, which launched in 2003. Second Life users create an avatar, an often-idealized stand-in for an individual’s actual self. The avatars become creative representations that exist only in the virtual realm where the user is provided with a second life and where they may spend as much or more time than they do interacting in their actual daily life. The fantasy dominates the real. Similarly, native cultures around the world engage in folk rituals that use bones and other animal matter to create avatars, masks and totems, allowing for individuals or groups to connect and identify with a Power or Spirit animal that signifies access to an ancient past or alternate reality. These folk traditions relate to similar occurrences in the wider culture via superhero narratives like Spider-man and X-Men where mutant bodies, depicted as having both animal and human traits, give humans access to the force and power of earth’s fiercer creatures.

Jennifer Angus

Jacob Heustis
photo jacobheustis.com

Andrea Stanislav
photo andreastanislav.com

Turner and Guyon
photo turnerguyon.com

Featuring: Jennifer Angus, John James Audubon, Bigert & Bergström, Drew Conrad, Mitch Eckert, Carlee Fernandez, Charles Fréger, Adam Fuss, Kay Polson Grubola, Edward Hart, Laura A. Hartford, Jochem Hendricks, Damien Hirst, Jacob Heustis, Lonnie Holley, Jessica Joslin, Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis, Vladimir Peric, Rosalie Rosenthal, Andrea Stanislav, Turner + Guyon, Meyer Vaisman.

via kmacmuseum.org