MAN’S BEST FRIEND ON ART DISPLAY
“Year of the Dog,” at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, contemplates our relationships with dogs
“Year of the Dog” at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center explores our relationships with dogs.
Chanel isn’t what you’d call a show dog. She’s got three legs, a fat neck and ears that sit too high on her head. Her coat alternates between dull gray and flat brown and her belly bears a sagging set of teets that hint at a sort of whambam lifestyle that no one, regardless of their breeding, ought to be proud of.
Yet, here she is, posed with purpose and dignity, in a photo by Shannon Johnstone on display at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, as full of humanity as the portraits of fine ladies and gentleman that hang throughout the esteemed museum’s galleries.
Wait, can dogs have “humanity?” Or do they simply reflect the level of humanity in their masters?
That’s the question posed by “Year of the Dog,” an exhibit that runs through Oct. 14 and features the work of five artists from across the country.
It’s a sentimental show for a serious museum to install, dangerously so, plucking the heartstrings of anyone who ever tossed a tennis ball to his best friend. Visitors gaze at the paintings,
photos and sculptures and say “awwwww” more often than a lot of art snobs might tolerate.
But “Year of the Dog” redeems itself though some clever curation by the museum’s Joy Armstrong. She’s let herself have a little fun, building an attraction around the Chinese zodiac’s official canine year, but she’s included artists who take their work seriously.
Start with the selections from Johnstone’s “Landfill Dogs” series, which has received wide acclaim. Johnstone, who lives in North Carolina, photographs shelter dogs frolicking in a local landfill — which is where they will end up too soon if no one adopts them. The dogs, with their wide eyes and wagged tails, have no idea of the peril they face and so they roll, run and jump with an ironic abandon.
Are they cute as buttons or evidence of a global overpopulation problem? Johnstone is actually kind of coy about it.
Curator Armstrong doesn’t leave it at that. She’s also brought into the show Denver artist Monique Crine’s series of exacting oil paintings of aging dogs. Working from photos she takes herself, Crine imbues her subjects with as much personalty as a paintbrush can muster.
There’s a black lab named Idgie, caught with her tongue hanging out; a furry, floppy mix named Maddie whose brown eyes knowingly meet the gaze of the viewer. Each dog is accompanied by a statement about its unique charms and the joys it brought to caretakers over its lifetime.
Crine is a photorealist, and her paintings have a dual edge. In a recent show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, she displayed portraits of professional football players after their career had ended. The paintings depicted successful, content guys, enjoying their hard-earned fortunes. But viewers knew the whole story and brought that to the experience of seeing them: These guys were past their prime, former heroes now on the sidelines.
The same feelings arise looking at her old dogs, each from a very happy home. They had it all but they’ll soon be goners, just an unfortunate byproduct of their limited lifespan. The dogs are joyful, but we get increasingly sad as we take them in.
There is a genuine poignancy in the juxtaposition of Crine’s spoiled beauties and Johnstone’s forsaken pups, and it says more about humans than it does about dogs.
Why do we coddle some and kill others? Are dogs really special or do we use and abuse them selfishly, only valuing the ones who lick our fingers, snuggle in at night and please our base senses? Are we compassionate lovers or are we monsters? Is it really all about us?
It’s complicated, of course, and Frank and Sharon Romero’s paintings of their dog Pablo get right to the point. The Los Angeles couple depict their rescued Dalmatian separately in oil renderings of the pup, mostly in domestic settings. The pieces are colorful, cartoonish and super cute.
But they play up the paradoxes of pet ownership. Pablo is sweet but really nothing special. Just a dog. And here his owners, vet- eran California artists famous for taking on social subjects like the Vietnam War, dote over him like he was child, raising his importance to that of major political issues of the last 100 years.
Similar absurdities in our relationships with pets surface in the ceramics of Santa Fe’s Ralph Scala and the mixed media creations of Chicago’s Nick Cave.
Scala’s life-size chihuahuas are roughly formed, and he paints and glazes them in multiple colors — brights reds, yellows and blues that would never occur in a dog’s coat. They have false, unnatural personalities, based not on who they really are, but on the traits their human caretakers apply to them. Are dogs as deep-thinking and colorful as we give them credit for being?
Cave gets at similar questions with his one piece in this show, from his “Rescue” series, which might look familiar to anyone who saw the major Cave retrospective staged at the Denver Art Museum in 2013.
Cave’s ceramic dogs are found objects, “rescued” from thrift shops, perched on stools and set in elegant, elaborate swirls of beads and birds, also acquired from second-hand stores. Is this dog junk or is it royalty? Are our dogs, by extension, disposable objects we own, or a part of the family?
“Year of the Dog” doesn’t really pose new questions. Pet owners contemplate their dogs all the time. They do a lot of staring, touching, looking into big eyes and wondering what is really going on in walnut-sized brains. We contemplate what our dogs mean to us and how lost we would be without them. It’s a personal relationship.
This exhibit brings it out in the open, asks us to share it and to confront the good things dog ownership says about our spirits and the dark things it can tell us about our souls.
It does answer that question about whether or not dogs can have humanity: They can’t.
Humans can try to imbue that quality into them, to spoil and suppose them into being just like us. But they lack our organizational skills and our qualities of self-determination. Put on exhibit, it’s clear they are what we make them, or what we don’t.