2015, VANCOUVER, CANADA
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE RABBIT
EXHIBITED AT OR GALLERY
CURATED BY JONATHAN MIDDLETON
MASTER RABBIT I SAW
Shortly after my first visit to the Berlin Zoo in 2004, a story appeared in the news of Juan, the Andean spectacled bear that paddled across a moat using a log for a raft and then scaled a wall, finally commandeering a bicycle in an attempt to escape the zoo in a bid for freedom that haunts me to this day. “Spectacled bears eat both vegetables and meat but children tend not to be on their menu,” the zoo’s deputy director Heiner Kloes assured the public. Unlike me, he was not otherwise concerned.
My artistic work is often informed by animals and is shaped by various genres of writing—ghost stories, tall tales, mysteries, myths, fairy tales, jokes, poems, essays, and memoirs. The Private Life of the Rabbit, my most recent exhibition, is no exception. It’s a ghost story, a tall tale, a mystery, a myth, a fairy tale, a joke, a poem, an essay, and a memoir.
It began with an invitation by Jonathan Middleton (director of Vancouver’s Or Gallery) to create an exhibition of new work for his series The Troubled Pastoral, co- produced with Mark Lanctôt (curator of Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain).
My take on the pastoral genre is absurdist. Everything I know about it I learned from Monty Python. I, like them, consider “England’s green & pleasant Land” (as William Blake called it) the setup of a surrealist joke. I access the image of the rural good life via their mad, intertextual stream of consciousness.
The Private Life of the Rabbit borrows its title from R.M. Lockley’s book of the same name, which recounts the life history and social behaviour of wild rabbits in Wales. Lockley wrote it in 1964, basing his insights on five years of painstaking field observations. I happened upon the work while researching Richard Adams’ classic children’s story Watership Down, which is indebted to Lockley’s account of rabbit life.
The Private Life of the Rabbit is a mash-up of Lockley’s popular work of natural history, Adams’ fantastic and dystopian view of the English countryside, and John Berger’s 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?”The show features a gigantic pair of rabbit ears made of high density foam and resin and a modernist rabbit hutch to go with the ears. Documentation of these in-progress pieces bookend the following series of photos taken at the Berlin Zoo. All photo-caption text on pages 54-64 is borrowed from Berger’s essay (from his book About Looking), which examines how the relationship between man and nature has changed over time.
Capilano Review, Issue 3.27, Fall 2015