Animal Antics as described by Doug Harvey

An eye for an eye. The elephant Lakshmi locks gazes with the photographer Ave – the one gussied up as an avatar of Hindu spirituality, the other blocked or mediated by a third, technological eye. Through the damming up of experience that photography (or art, culture, even memory) makes possible, we can stand in Ave’s place and experience the same uncanny rush of esse est percipi -- to be is to be perceived – through the time-binding dislocation of Art and the anthropocentricity -undermining freakiness of mutual regard with a highly intelligent non-human sentient being.

Lakshmi is the simplest and deepest of the “Animal Antics” images, but the series manages to capture an enormous range of complex relationships between our species and all the others – proprietary, devotional, exploitative, or often a comic mashup of all of the above, as when a cow walks into a leather goods store, or a museumgoer makes “eye” contact with the glassy counterfeits of a taxedermied lioness. An infinitesimal Chihuahua perches on the sunlit grave of “Hudson”, like some funhouse mirror distortion of Hachiko the Akita waiting for his master’s resurrection.

Elsewhere, Pildas snags some serious Decisive Momentage – particularly in the phenomenal Placa de Catalunya – which may be rife with sociopolitical implications as regards the history of interspecies politics in Barcelona, but is also one of the most seamlessly comic and formally satisfying tourist photos I’ve ever seen. The multilayered aesthetic, philosophical, and political content of these images aren’t stage-managed by the artist – they’re inherent in the world for those who can step out and look for them.

—Doug Harvey is co-owner of Winway Pleats Please AKA Chloe, the first whippet to successfully complete the advanced NW3 title in Canine Scent Work