Oregon Department of Kick Ass

The Hunt by  James King-Loo Yu
An exhibition curated by Michael Brophy and Vanessa Renwick

The relationship between predator and quarry remains a fertile subject for art, as it did when humans roamed plains and woodlands and tracking food, God, or sport, or each other. Hunting is the world's oldest narrative.
Today, our Lasceaux markings are everywhere; the stories, more convoluted, but present. These moments of unification, where the pursuer overtakes the pursued, the prey is subdued, the criminal ensnared, the lover enchanted, the objective neutralized, are all variations on an immortal refrain passed down in ritual, myth, song. These considerations underlie the selections for an exhibition orchestrated by painter Michael Brophy and filmmaker Vanessa Renwick entitled "The Hunt."
With eight artists including the curators, "The Hunt" explored elements of pursuit and capture. "None of us hunt, but we've all make art about it," Renwick said of the participants, "It's a totally raw, romantic idea."
"We talked about in the sense that it's an interesting way of looking at the landscape," said Brophy. "It's like a lens that focuses the way people think about where they are."
The intersection of human social values with environmental forces and the natural world is never far from any Northwesterner's mind. Hunting is a divisive social phenomena that often pits urban values against rural mores and shapes ideas of how the cultural and physical landscape should be used or depicted. Rather than adding to one side of this debate or the other, the artists of "The Hunt" accentuate the complexities, mining the rich history and symbolism.

The Photo Research Group is a Portland consortium comprised of photographer/fine-art printer Jenny Ankeny, Coos County photographers Scott and Brandi Gregory and Portland photo archivist/historian Tom Robinson. Hanging next to the routed wood sign at the show's entrance were black-and-white historic photographs selected and printed by the Photo Research Group,. Culled from sources ranging from 19th century glass-plate negatives to late-20th century found negatives, the prints were displayed on a faux-wood-paneled wall (itself, photo-generated). With scenes and portraits from across the country, the display became an impromptu family room where photographs of the hunters themselves are the trophies. "They're rites of passage," said Robinson. "Generations, passing down a heritage to each other, men out on vacations."

The subjects were varied: A rabbit drive and its aftermath; a hunting party spends an evening in joyous song with an accordion and bottled beer; a wolf stands forlornly in the woods, its hind leg caught in a trap. In one print, deer are propped up in a car as driver and passengers, the viewer presumably caught in the headlights in a grim visual joke. Many of the images capture individuals in candid poses: Holiday, fishing and camping photos, with an outdoorsman's bounty of meat and fur. The explicit documentation of carnage in some prints evokes the cold documentation of police crime photos.    

Vanessa Renwick, a Portland-based artist whose experimental and documentary film and video work explores issues regarding ethics, bodies and landscape, offered the poetic and satirical "Hunting Requires Optimism." Renwick's extensive research on wolves for the upcoming documentary film, "Critter," led to the concept behind the installation: 10 vintage refrigerators, each housing a TV playing video footage of wolves, solo and in packs, attempting to bring down prey. With the title spelled out in a cursive of black locust branches on a blood-red wall, viewers opened doors game-show style. The amazing footage -- shot at Yellowstone Park by cinematographer Bob Landis – showed plenty of chases, but only one successful kill. The howl of a wolf emanated from one empty refrigerator. The installation's title came from an old hunting book Renwick found. "That's totally wolves," according to Renwick, "because 90% of the time they don't get what they are after."

Cynthia Lahti portrays a stark solitude in the sculptural characters she presented in The Hunt. A Portland native and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, her work often utilizes a variety of strategies and media to explore recurring themes of personal and cultural mythology. In this show, four detailed figurines, made of blue glass or ceramic, depict armed men and women alone in the woods, intently searching for prey, each other or themselves. In The Happy Day, an altered children's book by Ruth Krauss, Lahti added her own drawings to the rustic illustrations, displayed on a red table and desk. Archers and shooters look upon scenes of ghostly, bucolic harmony or roam winter forests on a search for game. Couples slow-dance and sway; neotenic creatures peer from the snowy trees as hunters load pistols and nock arrows. In a paper collage triptych, "Landscape," Lahti combines giftwrapped cutouts and drawn figurative with doodles and finger-painted swirls made by her niece.
Lahti's vision of the wilderness is nostalgic and fraught with the possibility of emotional isolation, a looming specter of violence just out of view. The men, women and children in her work are invested in a constant struggle. "We all come from hunters," Lahti said. "There's still that drive."

Michael Brophy's paintings explore the consequences of human intrusion on the natural landscape and the contentious boundary between the modern, technological world and the natural order it increasingly envelops. In Coast Range felled trees, scattered shotgun shells, and a beer can on a stump obscure a view of mountains. Forest and Clearing (Aim) and Wild Kingdom (Bighorn) are small gouaches depicting target shooting and big game. With Pillar, Brophy painted one of the gallery's concrete columns to look deceptively like wood.
There is a sense of dread in Brophy's work, but his post-heroic presentation of the subjects he depicts gives an impression that a grand algebra has been set in motion with equilibrium inevitable. Even human intrusion and disruption can be seen on a larger scale as a reorganization of environmental balance; nature is a social construct, after all.
For Brophy hunting is not a simple issue. "It's like the logging industry for me," he said, "because everyone comes down black-or-white, where really it's the whole middle that's so interesting."

Malia Jensen often employs animal bodies and forms in her work. Every hunter seeks a trophy, and her wall-mounted sculptures are paradoxes challenging distinctions between animal and prize object. Unexpected materials blur the boundary between flesh and not-flesh, making the urge to touch the works appreciable. "Mascot," Jensen's swansong to an early painting career, draws from pop-sources: A deer head with Jasper Johns-like quilted skin of used paint rags rests upon a well-used palette base, empty beer bottles for antlers. In "Double Deer," constructed from red leather and nails, co-joined heads peer out from the wall, mutant taxidermy of a forest Janus. At once sensual and unsettling, the pieces posit an alternate zoology where dream and metaphor are transmuted into corporeal form. 

-from the CoreSample catalogue, Clearcut Press