‘‘Gatekeeper,’’ Marie Strauss
(RDS Gallery)
WHO do we let in? Who do we refuse? Who animates our stories? What is permitted to seep between worlds, and what escapes? These are some of the questions and explorations at play in Marie Strauss’ most recent exhibition of ceramics, paintings and works on paper. Captured by the exhibition title ‘‘Gatekeeper’’, these explorations encompass binaries of inclusion and exclusion pertaining to the borders of nation states (especially in the context of the pandemic), of relations between nonhuman animals, between human and nonhuman animals and between symbolic registers and psychological states of being.
Animals, both real and mythological, dominate Strauss’ works across media. They shimmer and flow in fluid sketchlike lines around the curvature of ceramic pots, and cascade in taxonomic freefall beyond species’ borders in vividly coloured large paintings. In Strauss’ worlds, the unlike cohabit with the unlike. Two owls nestle on a walrus and three owls perch calmly on a crocodile in two of the artist’s handbuilt ceramic works. While variations of these relationships may originate in the literature of fantasy, Strauss’ particular evocation of these unlikely pairings seems to centre on the relationality of nonhuman beings. Humankind is absent from the scenario.
In other works, the baboon, jackal, and falcon reprise more familiar symbolic roles for humankind — in this instance as funereal guardians. Of the many provocations on offer, Strauss draws attention to the symbolic and psychological load humans ask animals to bear.