Collaborative Animals
On view at Hopkins Hall Gallery
Collaborative Animals is a collage installation by artists Ashley Browne, Brett Davis, Christine Fashion, Chris Gilbert, Scott Hinger, Mär Martinez, Julia Matejcek, Sayaka Saito Davis, Benedict Scheuer, and Carmen Winant.
In this moment when the world has flipped on its axis, we might search for other ways of being. Animals offer up a world of alternatives. They are here, constantly and quietly, inhabiting the planet alongside us in the wildest diversity of ways. Octopi carry most of their neurons in their arms and are a literal model for what it might mean to think with one’s body. Other animals, like termites and coral, gather to form super-organisms where millions of individuals operate as one being.
At the same time, animals can seem far away and exotic: a ripe combination for devaluation. In a radically humancentric world, looking to the animal world for respite and inspiration is a way to lessen our allegiance to our own broken systems. What it takes to enter this state of being is to access our own animal mind, which this exhibition invites us to step into.
Collaborative Animals seeks to explore the myriad ways of being that exist in the animal world and that we can learn from. The artists, ranging from photographers to biologists, invite the public to witness them responding to their material and to one another either.
Interview with the Artists
Collaborative Animals is presented in partnership with Hybrid Arts Lab, a multi-venue learning lab that experiments with how art is imagined, made, viewed and understood within physical and digital spaces.