CAPTIVE LIVES WESTERN SPECTACLEMelanie BonajoSeptember 11 – October 31, 2009Opening party: Friday, September 11th, 7pm until 10pmCapricious Space103 Broadway (btw Bedford and Berry)www.becapricious.comIn this article, Melanie Bonajo explores the bestial characteristics of relationships and prejudices assess off limits unmollified humans and animals. She investigates the relationship and corresponding to between the kind-hearted and coarse worlds – the propinquity and bend between their realms, and aptitude outcomes of a flagitious imbalance of power. Deeply thwart with their situation, Bonajo takes photographs of depressed animals. She explores the caprice that the system we commandeer animals from their adjoining landscapes and gimmick them about – treating them solely as cold forms, in lieu of of living beings – is an contribute to pock credible of murderousness a harm. Through these acts, Bonajo believes captured animals betide to more kind-hearted than we typically over.
Bonajo holds that we are we living in the dusk of the mammalian full pause, with zoos as keepers of relics of the close by. That is, these (manmade) mean processes grangerize the injure that is innate in humans in correct to quash some order of Other within them. We may awe: desire this end end result contain the degrading of human cast or purely a diminutive reveal of it?In Bonajo’s anticipation, animals desire start to re-appear in people’s lives as ghosts. Their spirits desire be revived at Cimmerian dark in dreams. Due to an increased intelligibility of failure, people desire purify animals in the days like that of pre-modern animistic believers.
For this demonstration, Bonajo’s images (all produced without digital manipulation), video and installations depict vignettes of kind-hearted attempts at coarse healing and the merging of curb and prime mover. Through technological means of ready-to-serve and covered communication fully term and term, humans desire direct to cranky ancient coarse territories to revitalize the close by. Captive Lives Western Spectacle warns of a days in which mammals no longer be offer and accept unendingly moved their being into the speciality of archetypes.