On the opening day of Deus Ex Bark-ina, a multi-author love letter to dogs, I made my way to the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on James Street. A vibrant purple mural greeted me at the exterior of the building, and after I rang the doorbell, Michelle Vong, PC ’29 greeted me and led me into the gallery. They were interning at the Ely Center this summer, and as I wandered the space, they perched on a stool near the entrance to the new exhibition, painting its title in a grassy green on the wall.
Deus Ex Bark-ina plays on the concept of a deus ex machina, alluding to how the dog is often not just a living creature but also conceptualized as a convenient means to solve human problems. Humans imagine dogs as many things: laborers, protectors, and, most notably, dependent and dependable companions thought to love us unconditionally. Much of this exhibition, curated by Michael Morgan, is an irreverent interrogation of our contrived human-animal divide and comfortable imaginations of canine docility. It’s also a sequel of sorts to Morgan’s previous curation at Cornell, Magnum O-Pspsps, which similarly examined the many symbolic meanings that humans project onto cats.
Morgan, who had braved the long drive from Ithaca to New Haven the night before, graciously showed me around the gallery. One of his favorite pieces in the show is Alix Pearlstein’s sculptural installation Suspended Branch, standing near the back of the exhibition space. Suspended Branch consists of three small model dogs, all tethered to the same thin branch and standing in a circle. At first glance, I thought the piece represented captivity, with the single branch standing in for a tree that humans had tied their dogs to. However, for Morgan, Suspended Branch is all about a social contract: that is, communal efforts at the expense of individuals’ instant gratification. The branch itself is only held up by the tension in the strings, and, as Morgan explained, “The dogs all want the stick, but if one dog were to go towards the stick, it would fall over.”
Yet, not all of the exhibition’s dogs are so well-behaved. Morgan and I migrated to what he dubbed “the sexytime wall,” centered around Mona Kowalska’s Dogz, a clay slab with fingerprint indentations that together create the image of two dogs having sex. “To us, the dog is a tool, but what happens when the dog is allowed to be wild and autonomous?” Morgan pondered. Gazing upon Dogz alongside pieces like Leslie Brack’s Lick, an oil painting that juxtaposes a dog with its tongue out and Brack’s partner’s crotch, I heard in Morgan’s question similar musings about humans as well.
Meanwhile, a quite literal human-dog projection sits in the middle of the exhibition floor. Matthew Lax’s AN ANIMATED DOG READS JOHN BERGER, HARAWAY, AND KAFKA consists of a large, black metal dog crate with a flat screen inside. On the screen plays a video of a speaking, CGI rough collie, her fur stringy and her demeanor uncanny. Sitting down with Lax, I learned the reason behind the dog’s eerily human-like nature: Lax himself provided her voice and movements, the latter having been created via motion capture. As the animated collie on screen, Lax speaks about how dogs are forced into dependency on their humans and advocates for more just relations. In our conversation, Lax explained that the “loyalty” we expect from dogs and often idealize even in one another “is a very complicit relationship,” citing John Berger’s Why Look at Animals, Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto, Franz Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog, and his own experiences growing up in a collie-breeding family as key inspirations for the script. His critique of our assumptions about what a human-dog dynamic should look like is evident in the overall piece’s design, too. When she is not confronting the viewer head-on, the collie traverses a cold, gray liminal space on screen but remains trapped by the physical cage, drawing out, as Lax said, “the superficiality and the artificial” nature of our interaction with her. The piece is an interaction with a dog (and the human artist) that feels in some ways piercing and intimate, yet intentionally devoid of warmth.
Lax’s piece isn’t the only artwork that seeks to foster unconventional intimacy. On a table near the windows is Kyle Bellucci Johanson’s Lupa Rossi, a partially hand-drawn video game designed for two players who, sitting opposite each other, can communicate with each other across the table but cannot see each other’s screens. To Johanson, video games are particularly unique because they are “the only form of theater in which you are a participant,” and his set-like environments draw out the game’s theatrical quality. In Lupa Rossi, one person plays an opera singer who works several jobs to make ends meet, while the other person plays the opera singer’s dog, who escapes the apartment after the opera singer, in her haste to leave for work, accidentally leaves the front door unlocked. The game is both part of Johanson’s continuing exploration of Marxist philosophy and deeply rooted in his experiences and observations as an artist in today’s economic reality: figures like Antonio Gramsci make cameo appearances, and the opera singer’s experiences mirror how a close art school friend of Johanson’s spent most of his time driving for Uber just to keep the lights on. Ultimately, Lupa Rossi asks, as Johanson put it to me, “What forms subjectivity?” In other words, the game is a performance that invites players to critically examine how socioeconomic pressures shape who we are and how we engage with those around us, whether they be fellow humans or furry friends.
In the hours I spent in the gallery that afternoon, I found myself returning again and again to Dogz. Kowalska visited the Ely Center briefly at the beginning of the afternoon, and she told me then that she is very intentional about using her fingers, without any other tools, to shape the clay. Coming back to Dogz, I imagined how Kowalska must have carefully shaped the clay in her hands, gradually building up the image of the two dogs on the otherwise smooth surface. As it turns out, an exhibition seemingly about dogs and what they mean to us, whether expressed through painting, sculpture, digital art, or immersive experience, also says a lot about us humans, too.
Deus Ex Bark-ina is on view at the Ely Center until Sunday, September 13 and will conclude with a closing ceremony, complete with both dogs in need of a forever home and fresh hot dogs, on September 13 from 3–6pm.
