ANIMALS (a requiem) is an exhibition of large-scale black and white photographic prints. Dark and poetic many of the images are death portraits of animals in our midst and suggests an uneasy relationship between them and us.
The quotes below accompany the exhibition and are hung on the gallery walls
“We have long regarded animals as a kind of machinery,
and the landscapes they move through as backdrops,
as paintings. In recent years this antiquated view has
begun to change. Animals are understood as mysterious,
within the context of sophisticated Western learning
that takes into account such things as biochemistry
and genetics. They are changeable, not fixed, entities,
predictable in their behavior only to a certain extent.
The world of variables they are alert to are astonishingly
complex, and their responses are sometimes highly
sophisticated. The closer biologists look, the more
the individual animal, like the individual human being,
seems a reflection of that organization of energy
that quantum mechanics predicts for the particles that
compose an atom.” – Barry Lopez
“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness,
for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below
ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. In a world
older and more complete than ours, they move finished
and complete, gifted with the extensions of the senses
we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall
never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings;
they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in a net
of life and time.” – Henry Beston
“I am a life that wills to live in the midst of other life
that wills to live. I must interpret the life about
me as I interpret the life that is my own. My life
is full of meaning to me. The life around me must
be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others
to respect my life, then I must respect the other life
I see, however strange it may be to mine. And not only
other human life, but all kinds of life: life above
mine, if there be such life; life below mine, as I know
it to exist. Ethics in our western world has hitherto
been largely limited to the relation of man to man.
But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics
that will include the animals also.” – Albert Schweitzer