GOOD DOG BAD DOG

curated by gabrielle banzhaf

November 2022

GOOD DOG BAD DOG | 11.12.22 | Curators Statement

Heavily influenced by Sophie Calle and her practice of public vs. private, to me, SHED (and the act of having a “gallery”) is a social and philosophical experiment, a performance piece of sorts. A framework to explore, together with artists, ideas about social values and art, and how they are informed by the spaces and places where we live and work. Over the past year, we worked together with individual artists, one at a time, to produce projects tailor-made for the space. For the final show of the season, I decided to bring together a mix of new artists and continue conversations with artists that we had started with their solo shows.

Our relationships with dogs are complex, multifaceted, deeply emotional, and as old as time itself. Some of the first known representations of dogs were discovered in rock art on the Arabian peninsula dating back as far as 9,000 years. These particular images of leashed hunting dogs have helped solve the evolutionary puzzle of how and when dogs became domesticated. The people who painted them likely did it because dogs were a meaningful part of their daily lives. Our special counterparts, dogs have informed humans and our cultures, histories, and identities as much as anything else you could imagine. The artists in this show produced work with these feelings in mind.

With GOOD DOG BAD DOG I wanted to further test the pliability of our domestic sphere by installing works throughout the entire outdoor spaces of our home- including the deck, driveway, tool shed, and the house itself. Including these spaces allows the work to exist in ways that challenge both our concept of living space and the places we encounter art. The materiality of these works is together with the materiality of place- underneath the giant oak tree, the home, the garden, amongst shovels and tools and bags of mulch. In some moments there's what feels like acceptance- an uncanny familiarity between the work and its surroundings, in others the encounter is more strange.