Cat Faces
opening reception Thursday, February 2nd 2012 6-9pm (view photos here)
Read the Cat Faces call for entries.
Featuring work by:
Laura Averill
Liat Berdugo + Leora Fridman
Jeremy Christopherson
Dead Squirrel (Kurt Chiang + Caitlin Stainken)
Tom Deslongchamp
Sabrina Habel
Clare Hebert
Susan Gallacher-Turner
Tory Franklin
Jason Nelson
Dennis Palazzolo
Jessica Phoenix
Jeremy Rotsztain
Paul Valadez
Cecelia Venolia
Mike Wurn
More background reading:
Ethan Zuckerman’s Cut Cat Theory of Digital Activism
Sianne Ngai’s The Cuteness of the Avant Garde
On display:
A new Cat Face-themed game by net artist and cyberpoet Jason Nelson. An homage to the legendary Tokyo night life character known as Daiyamondo Neko, or “Diamond Cat”. Crowdsourced imaginings of cat-like plastic surgery on various celebrities. A collection of cat calls heard by women in the San Francisco’s Mission District over the course of a year and a half. Recollections of graffiti on cat-face-shaped drainage pipes in Los Angelese. Photos of pets on Flickr analyzed digitally and re-worked into still images from animations made in C++. And much more….
"Lioness" by Susan Gallacher-Turner
“Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists –Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations!— in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.”
- Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955 [R.I.P. Renton - FICTILIS]
"a cat bides his time" by Tom Deslongchamp
FICTILIS
210 S Washington St
Seattle, WA 98104