Catch & Carry at Volume, Inc. James Stanfield

I’ve spent a few days writing a review about Catch & Carry, an exhibition at the tiny temporary space of Volume, Inc. The exhibition smartly centers on depictions of plants and animals, mostly minus the landscapes they inhabit, and the different media used to capture these depictions. Several revealing points pop out of the dialogue between works including our psychological need for some form of experience with nature, the way in which video and indeed all media work to distance us from that experience, and the common use of plants and animals as a shorthand notation for natural landscape.

I’m not going to reproduce my review here, but I did want to talk about one work in the show, a video loop by Elizabeth Neel called Stand (After Guernica). Aside from the heavy academic title I found the work to be particularly resonant.

The loop depicts a few seconds of what looks to be surveillance video of a horse attempting to wobble to its legs. These few seconds are repeated indefinitely, and the horse is never actually seen standing. In fact the video comes off as just a single image with the duration of the video seeming either very short or very long. It’s much like a wildly beautiful painting, albeit one that moves.

But the creature looks extremely fragile as it comes to its legs, and I began to read the horse’s action as very painful for the animal. The work emphasizes the dominance of what it means to capture an image, and also what it means to manipulate it by cropping and editing. I’m sure the horse was not really in pain, but I began to feel guilty for enjoying the beauty of an image that had captured an otherwise majestic animal in such a compromised moment. This simple snippet of video was revealed as powerfully capable of degrading its subject. In this way the loop became a charged fragment or a kind of media critique.