WILMA CRUISE
The Animals in Alice
19 July- 17 August 2011
iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art
“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”
— Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass)
The Animals in Alice constitutes the next installment in a series of exhibitions exploring the nature of the animal-human interface, initiated with the traveling exhibition, Cocks Asses &… (I Can’t Hear) between 2007- 2009.
The exhibition, opening in July at iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art, consists of a series of drawings, prints and text that explore the curious interface between Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the animals that inhabit her Wonderland.
In Alice’s dream world animals have agency; they speak. And although they speak her language, Alice does not always understand what is happening. She is pushed and pulled hither and thither in a confusion of understanding. “Who are you?” asks the caterpillar. A short while later the pigeon rephrases the question, “What are you?” To neither question has Alice the answer.
The caterpillar’s question is significant. Who is Alice and, by extrapolation, who are we? Are we right to presume our position of superiority in relation to the perceived “dumb” animals? Do we really deserve our place on top of the Cartesian pile as it were? It is an ontological question. The drawings, prints and sculptures that make up the Alice series explore these ideas.
“Alice”, in this instance, functions as an alter ego – that part that delves into the dark rabbit hole of pre-consciousness. The animals, such as those that inhabit Alice’s world – a pig, a hare, a cat, a dog – appear to have knowledge beyond our understanding. They carry a burden of meaning, not as universal archetypes in a Jungian sense (although this is perhaps unavoidable), but as carriers of other pre-conscious meanings. Like the Cheshire cat, the pig smiles, sealed in her hermetic world of pigness and pig knowledge.
In the tale of Alice in Wonderland, words enhance the sense of a world inverted; one that is absurd and contradictory. Phrases from the text find their way into the prints, drawn on a series of blackboards and on the walls, providing a link between Alice’s elusive world and the animals that gaze out at the viewer. The words do not explain the images nor do they make (logical) sense, suggesting that language fails in the face of animal-human interaction. Instead it is in the area of the pre-linguistic, ‘the in-between space’, that possible answers lie. Signification, it would seem, resides in the body and between bodies.