Animals in Yalda Afsahs work appear as leading characters and living beingsnot only through the gaze of their human companions, but also independently of humans. They are not merely passive objects of human influence, but themselves social actors. The trilogy is a sometimes painfully intimate portrait of the mutual dependencies between human and animal. It never suggests that a return to an imagined nature is possible, but provokes us to think of other modes of togetherness.
In Duan Jianyus unique cannibalization of painting, her anarchic embrace of humor and chaos, her opening up a space of radical play where the unlikeliest people and objects are brought together, the rules of piety that typically govern painting in China are upended.
Nothing and everything is hidden in McKnights photographs. Every blade of grass has an intense personality, cut to perfection, rendered absolutely itself. Every single hair on these bodies is so perfectly visible, you could almost reach through the picture plane to pluck it. He loves me, he loves me not.
In resistance to this condition, I think we should perform an autopsy of critical style. Cutting into the cool and unfeeling skin of art writing, through its numbed fascia and tightened old muscles, extracting and inspecting its dried veins, we could track down the culprit behind this professions undead smoothness.
Changing landscapes across the tapestry create a sense of transition from one scene to the next: a body on the move. This feeling of motion is heightened by an almost imperceptible metallic thread that runs across the tapestry surface, glimmering in the light to give the illusion of movement and providing the work with an anachronistic materiality.
