Organized by Yasufumi Nakamori
Opens on Saturday, October 16th and runs through Sunday, November 7th.
Gallery hours are Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 12 pm to 6 pm, and weekdays by appointment.

As Franz Marc painted “Fate of Animals” in 1913 amidst the political chaos preluding World War I, the artists in “Animal Destinies” create works on animals, their fates, and their relationships to humans, perhaps as a metaphor of our own fates and the reflections of our lives in the current state of world conflict and chaos. These works are about questioning the status quo, self-criticism, and embracing our comrades and outsiders. Ranging from paintings, drawings, and sculptures to photography and videos, the artists present a wide range of critical and fantastic views on animals and their relation to human culture.

The Artists

The videos of Anne Yuki Eastman (New Haven, CT) meditatively explore the behavior of animals in artificially caged environments through the eyes of zoo-goers, but ultimately, the self-absorbed animals make us realize that viewers of the videos are perhaps in the most controlled environment of all. The sculptures of Dana Orland (New York, NY) represent a mutative mixture of a cyborg, an exquisite corpse, a camel, and a woman, and are perhaps her self-portrait, relating to her identity as a woman artist originally from Israel. In his drawings, René Treviño (Baltimore, MD) also suggests his identity as a Mexican-American artist, using mythical images of graceful and virile male birds as symbols of masculinity while blending them into a kitsch queer aesthetics. Lamar Peterson’s (Brooklyn, NY) brightly colored and vividly composed paintings present, at first glance, nostalgic and comfortable portrait images, often including a pet animal, but a closer look reveals disturbing narratives in unsettling circumstances, which strangely position the animal as the knowing subject. The photographs of Samantha Bass (New York, NY) explore the complex relationship between humans and animals raised for consumption. Her work, eloquent and haunting, lyrical and provoking, depicts animals in a variety of domesticated and industrialized settings, and affords its viewers the opportunity to witness, reflect upon, and ultimately come to a greater understanding of our present relationship to animals. Similarly, the video by Sonja Feldmeier (Basel, Switzerland) reveals the inside of the animal slaughter business, but with a focus on its hardworking laborers, in contrast to dog groomers who nap while waiting for their clients to arrive. Once they do arrive, the groomers pamper the animals exorbitantly, which is captured in a particularly bizarre and mordant video by this Swiss artist. The video and photography installation of Jeroen Kooijmans (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) perhaps references a historical and mythological interaction between humans and animals. For example, this is evident in his interaction with wild monkeys while dressed as an ape, and his footage of a veiled woman swimming with a horse head buoy, swimming as if from an immense danger. ______________________________________________________________________________
Goliath Visual Space is a not-for-profit, artist run organization in Greenpoint, Brooklyn established to provide a fertile and creative environment for artists and to foster knowledge and communication about the arts. Goliath introduces emerging and unrepresented artists in all media to the public through an ongoing exhibition schedule and a series of readings, performances and artist talks.