Bos Taurus
April 7 – June 15, 2007
Installation by Cuban art & science collective, Los Animistas
ArtNight Reception event: Saturday, April 7, 6:00 – 8:30pm
1629 18th Street, Santa Monica
Maura Bendett
Jeff Cain
Joyce Campbell
Christine Nguyen
Orlan
Lothar Schmitz
Curated by Pam Posey
July 14 – Septmeber 14, 2007
ArtNight Reception event: Saturday, April 7, 6:00 – 8:30pm
1639 18th Street, Santa Monica
18th Street Arts Center presents “Bos Taurus,” a taxidermy-based art installation, showing April 7 to June 15, 2007 in the 18th Street Project Space at 1629 18th Street, Santa Monica.
The ArtNight reception event will be held Saturday, April 7, 2007, 6:00–8:30 pm, including a free concert by percussion master Angel Luis Figueroa and the band, Afro-Cuban Experiment, and open studios by international and local artists. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 10am-7pm. For more details, go to www.18thstreet.org.
Los Animistas is a cross-disciplinary team, comprising a visual artist, video artist, biologist, and taxidermist. The team came together to unite the artistic and biological investigative fields in considering ethical, aesthetic, and ecological issues. In addition to their expertise in their individual fields, each of the Los Animistas team has also acquired both art and science credentials in the United States and Cuba. It is the animal that the team employs as the primary image, object, and metaphor of their installations. Comprising presentation of taxidermy creatures alongside scientific studies, drawings, video footage, photographs, and both natural and artificial artifacts, Los Animistas’s installations displace the animals from their natural habitat, bring them into an artistic environment that also inculcates scientific processes, and pose them before us, dead and stuffed. The installations are intended to affect the viewer with a visceral reaction; a response to the sacrifice of animal life that is at once empathic and – drawing power from our ancient relationship with the animals we have hunted, killed, eaten, sacrificed and worshipped – atavistic. Los Animistas’s work powerfully stimulates consideration of the relationship between nature and human culture and most particularly of the investigative pathologies by which we have defined and examine the ‘natural’ as an entity separate from ourselves.
