Friday, January 10, 2014

The Kingdom / Room 3

"In each of these pictures there is at least one dog. That's clear and it might not be no more than a gimmick. Yet in fact the dogs offer a key for opening a door. No, a gate - for here everything is outside, outside and beyond"

Pentti Sammallahti 
Dog with Bag
 1992
Dimensions unknown
http://www.candacedwan.com/#New_York/Artists/Pentti_Sammallahti




In Berger's earlier book About Looking he dedicates one chapter to animals and our relationship to them throughout the development of human civilization. Many historians agree that it was our relationship to the dog that brought us of out of the Paleolithic Age and into the Neolithic age. It was our acceptance into the pack that assisted in developing community amongst our own species.



Pentti Sammallahti
White eyed dog with boy
1992
Dimensions unknown
http://www.candacedwan.com/#New_York/Artists/Pentti_Sammallahti


Walker Evans
A Sharecropper's Yard
Hale County, Alabama 1936
Silver Print
5 5/8" x 8 5/16"
http://www.leegallery.com/walker-evans/walker-evans-photography



The human role within the Animal Kingdom has traversed a complicated and complex path. Gradually escalating ourselves above our planetary relatives and neighbors through first a cohesive and integrated relationship of agriculture and animal husbandry, and then through the Industrial Revolution’s territorial progress and development, the Kingdom has shifted from a ecological system that caters to one species alone, leaving the other creatures and ‘members’ of this kingdom to exist within the margins of man-made environments (National Parks & Zoos, Industrialized Farming, etc.). As their ‘natural’ world shrinks our development of compartmentalized environments grows at a rapidly increasing rate, and along with it the excess residue of such environments.



Vik Muniz 
Pictures of Junk Series (Saturn Devouring one of his sons After Francisco De Goya)
2005
Digital C-Print
93.5" x 74.5"
http://www.renabranstengallery.com/Muniz_Saturn.html