ATTEMPTING TO RENDER what it is to be human is an absurd task, which makes it all the more urgent. We are long past the postwar afterglow of the “Family of Man” and other ultimately exclusionary attempts at unity. To know that and yet to pursue unironic ideas about our collective condition—despite all current political, social, and theoretical factors—is a profound act of faith in art. The artists Ellen Berkenblit, Carroll Dunham, Sarah Peters, and Kyle Staver are creating internally consistent speculative spaces in which to explore and, possibly, recuperate the idea that art is capable of representing what it’s like to be human. These “worlds” are empyrean, prelapsarian, suspended in an archaic “time” that exists outside of time. Shaped and inflected by ancient myths, Biblical stories, and other deep strata of human culture, but also by twentieth-century popular illustration, these artists’ work suggests a simultaneous longing to return to Eden and an awareness that we cannot do so—and that even if we could, Eden itself likely wasn’t so Edenic. These artists investigate and foreground eros in the broadest sense—as life force, joy, and polymorphous perversity.
Animals are the emissaries of this sensibility, and they act as magnets for empathy in the work, eliciting feelings of identification in the viewer. They may also represent those parts of humanity that aren’t merely human—those aspects of our universal selves that we share with animals, that aren’t determined by language or other strictly human structures. While the four artists’ work is figurative, and narrative in a fragmented way, their projects are also grounded in the physical. They are invested in the objecthood of their art, and the things they depict within their fictional spaces tend to intersect or open into real space, as though lifting out of picture planes or off of pedestals to further propagate their makers’ worlds. Both at the level of representation and in their exploration of the vitality and sensuality of making, Berkenblit, Dunham, Peters, and Staver investigate and foreground eros in the broadest sense—as life force, joy, and polymorphous perversity.
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