Animal Nature - press release

The Regina Gouger Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon is pleased to announce the exhibition Animal Nature, August 26 – October 2, 2005.  An opening reception will take place on Friday, September 2 from 5-8 PM.  The Miller Gallery co-organized Animal Nature with artists Lane Hall and Lisa Moline from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Animal Nature is an exhibition that developed out of an ongoing, expanding web-project entitled Criminal Animal  found at www.criminalanimal.org.  The exhibition, catalogue and related projects are unconventional in their approach. The undertaking brings together artists from around the globe with scholars and critics who all are engaged in investigations of “the animal” in one way or another.  Rather than positing a tight thesis, this exhibition-as-experiment contains diverse responses to open-ended questions.

The animal and animal-body have long been sites of controversial research – medical studies, pharmaceutical investigations, and consumer product testing, to name a few. Animal Nature focuses on a different kind of research: poetic, empathic, personal, semiotic, formal.

Ours is a project designed to be deliberately experimental, provocative, relevant, expressive, intellectually engaging and truly interdisciplinary.  It features the work of Steve Baker and Edwina Ashton, Catherine Chalmers, Jim Duesing and Jessica Hodgins, Lane Hall and Lisa Moline, Andrew Johnson, Eduardo Kac,  Dorijan Kolundzija, Lyne Lapointe, Per Maning,  Olly and Suzi, Michael Pestel, Nigel Rothfels, Angela Singer, and Stephen Wilson.  More about the participants may be found at www.cmu.edu/millergallery.

A full-color catalogue produced by the Miller Gallery will also be available.  It features an essay by Steve Baker, author of The Postmodern Animal, along with entries by Lane Hall, and Jenny Strayer, Director of the Miller Gallery.

The Miller Gallery is located on the Carnegie Mellon campus. It is free and open to the public. Hours of operation are Tuesday – Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visitor parking is available in the East Campus Parking Garage, located on Forbes Avenue just east of the Moorewood intersection.  For more information, contact Jenny Strayer at 412 268 3877 or jstrayer@andrew.cmu.edu. Exhibitions at the Miller are supported in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, individual sponsors, and the School of Art and College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.