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A Fugitive, Some Maps, Cute Animals and a SharkPost an Event »

Catharine Clark Gallery

October 4 - November 16, 2008

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248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
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A Fugitive, Some Maps, Cute Animals and a Shark Genealogy of the Supermarket, 2005, Framed photographs on wallpapered wall
Catharine Clark Gallery announces the concurrent solo exhibitions: The Word, new text-based work by Ray Beldner, and A Fugitive, Some Maps, Cute Animals and a Shark, video and mixed media projects by Nina Katchadourian. An opening reception for the artists is on Saturday, 4 October, 4–6pm. In conjunction with the solo exhibitions the gallery will host a book signing for the introduction of Charles Gute’s book Revisions and Queries, published by The Ice Plant. In this publication Gute, a conceptual artist and editor of art publications, presents more than 50 drawings that he developed from corrected publisher’s proofs. In these drawings the originally authored texts are removed and his edits remain, forming images. The resulting works on paper resemble line drawings, choreographic markings, or musical notations. Prior to the opening, from 3–4pm, the gallery will host a panel discussion: Mistakes Were Made, with speakers Charles Gute, Nina Katchadourian, and Ray Beldner musing on the subject of mistakes as a source for their artistic practices. The panel will be moderated by independent curator and writer, Marcia Tanner. In A Fugitive, Some Maps, Cute Animals and a Shark, Nina Katchadourian explores the complex relationship between humans and animals, which is often fraught with our human projections and fantasies about creatures quite different from ourselves. The Continuum of Cute, for example, is a grouping of appropriated images of animals sourced from the Internet. Katchadourian has ranked, from left to right, and from cutest to most grotesque, the selected creatures’ ‘portraits’. A giant inter-species beauty contest, the project investigates both our individual and collective sense of the "cute" at the same time as it indulges the anthropomorphic qualities that are often embedded in our sense of the word. The Continuum of Cute originated as a web project for the inaugural exhibit, Unmonumental, at the New Museum, New York, in which the viewer could reorganize the pictures of the animals on an interactive website (http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/montage/katchadourian/.). Katchadourian’s exhibit also features two video-based projects. Fugitive is a six-channel video installation with footage of an orangutan at the Washington DC zoo traveling across a high wire. Presented on six monitors arranged in a circle, the animal appears to move around the circle from TV set to TV set, stuck in a loop that neither the animal nor the viewer can escape. Mystic Shark is a single-channel video projection that was shot in a hotel room in Mystic, Connecticut where the artist dons a set of petrified shark teeth purchased at the MysticSeaportMuseum’s gift shop. Playing with the mythical viciousness of this particular creature, the shark we find here is insecure, aging, and incompetent, and elicits more sympathy than fear in the viewer. Katchadourian’s Geographic Pathologies from 1996 are on view for the first time in this exhibit. These rearranged paper maps explore the visual connections between geography and anatomy. The tumorous and misshapen geographic forms in these maps are both grotesque and familiar, and given the current backdrop of our climate crisis they also read as a distortion that could be the result of environmental abuse. Katchadourian holds a Bachelors of Art from Brown University, a Masters of Fine Arts from University of California, San Diego, and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. She lives and works in New York. Her recent retrospective exhibition Opener 11: Nina Katchadourian: All Forms of Attraction at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College was nominated for best monographic exhibition by the Association of International Art Critics. This is Katchadourian’s third solo exhibition with Catharine Clark Gallery.