“What separates human from animal?”
asks ceramist
and mixed-media artist
.
“What borders exist between real and imagined, beautiful and repugnant, animate
and inanimate?” These are among the questions underlying the strange menagerie
that has recently taken up residence at
Duane Reed Gallery in
the artist’s intimate new solo exhibition. Through each one of the carefully
crafted animal sculptures on view, she challenges biological taxonomies,
busting boundaries between species by merging their features and forms to
create hybrid beings that are much more than the sum of their manifold parts.
There is, for example, The
One That Got Away (2014), a wall-mounted head, which, at
first, looks like a gazelle. But something, many things, are subtly off: its
pelt is oddly mottled and fluffy; its face is too purely white; its eyes are
blue and uncannily human; and its gracefully curving horns seem to go on for
too long. Closer inspection reveals that where there should be fur there are
chicken feathers, a jarring avian-mammalian juxtaposition made all the more
extreme by their seamless integration into one form. Chicken feathers also grow
out of a standing, deer-like creature, oppositely titled, The
One That Stayed (2014). The feathers cover only its ears and
hooves. The rest of its body, including its impossibly elongated legs, is a
hairless, deep charcoal black, causing it to appear otherworldly, ghostlike,
hovering between life and death, or, perhaps, an afterlife. The
Hare (2014), a crimson sculpture of a reclining hare, also
seems at once alive and dead. While its lush coloring and articulated
musculature suggests alertness, it also looks like it has been skinned.
Pichaske sees herself as operating
within what she calls “the traditions of the grotesque and uncanny,” and always
at the intersections between “the familiar and strange.” This is most apparent
in Ghost of Snow (2013), a sculpture of an
ape, our closest animal relative. With its thoughtful mien and delicately
seated posture, it embodies and exudes humanness, compelling a sense of
connection, of a shared identification, exactly as the artist intends. “Once we
identify with them,” she says of her interspecies inventions, “we admit that
perhaps the definitions they upturn are not so clearly defined as we think.”