Next Friday, stop-gap projects will unleash Dog Breath, an exhibition that sniffs around our mystical, metaphorical, and deeply personal relationship to dogs. The group show will be on view October 4th–November 1st, 2024 and we will celebrate with an October 4th opening and a November 1st closing. We look forward to seeing you at both First Friday receptions, 6-9pm.
“When I ask whom I touch when I touch a dog [,] I learn something about how to inherit in the flesh. Woof . . .”
-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet
Dog Breath brings together artists Natalie Wadlington (NY), Raven Moffett (OR), Brittany Kieler (MN), Eva Sturm-Gross (NY), Ella Rose Flood (IL), Noelle Choy (MO), and Cameron Cameron (CA). Working through sculpture, drawing, print, painting, photo/fabric collage, video, and poetry and prose, these artists all consider ‘dog’ as both form and friend. The dogs in this show act as witness, as sense, as guide, and as makers of messes. They tell stories and hold stories, rolling over to expose wounds and tender bellies. They are ageless and grow old, lick your face and piss on the floor. They peer behind the curtain, keeping secrets—both theirs and ours—while we attempt to see through their eyes, seeing nothing yet feeling everything. In Chinese mythology, foo dogs are the guardians of a threshold, such as a house. In some stories they guard Heaven, and in some they guard Hell. But everyone knows that all dogs go to heaven and it just so happens that G-o-d is d-o-g spelled backwards.
The works in the show are often playful, but speak poignantly and sincerely about the complexities of our relationships to others—be that animal, family, or environment. They speak to our feverish capacity for care as well as grief. As exhibiting artist and scholar Raven Moffett writes:
The idea of “dog” is not as singular and inflexible as many Euro-American Christian narratives would have us believe. As the species outside of ourselves who we have lived with, hunted with, survived with, played with, learned from, and loved for the longest, dogs have made us who we are today…My dogs teach me abundance, responsibility, boundaries, and fierce love every day. They have guided me on my continuous journey to becoming my best self, to becoming more human.
Whom do I touch when I touch a dog? WOOF
