Cat Faces show
Work that results in a cat face, but has an interesting way of getting there. That’s right, a cat face. The face of a cat.
Work in unusual media, on an unusual scale, work that involves an impossibly elaborate process, a succession of material transformations or conceptual translations, or uses complicated machinery, industrial mechanisms, or other impractical techniques, work that requires painstaking labor, superhuman patience, or fantastic leaps in imagination, that accumulates its own impressive critical adornment and theoretical justification, but results, after all that, in the end, in a cat face.
All media considered; non-traditional media encouraged. Conceptual and performance work will also be considered. Twist your own distinct practice – no matter how violently it must be twisted – to make it produce a cat face.
Seattle, 2012
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
Background reading:
Ethan Zuckerman’s Cut Cat Theory of Digital Activism
Sianne Ngai’s The Cuteness of the Avant Garde
“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