To live in a densely populated environment is to be on view whileviewing others; to exchange intimate moments with strangers.Elizabeth Jaeger's curiously animate clay worlds reflect thepsychological effects that accompany this experience of lookingand being looked at. Sculpted by hand, her objects and beingsembody the effects of the gaze through a number of distortionsincluding scale shifts, fragmentation, and anthropomorphization.These expressive traits impose an indistinct fluidity betweenfigures, beings and things. If looking often implies a relationship ofpower, Jaeger's objects complicate expected hierarchies betweenhumans and our surroundings.
This shift between observer and observed is central to prey, whichunfolds across two distinct environments. In the first, a series ofblack cubes line the walls of the gallery_._ What appear here firstas stark, minimalist sculptures reveal themselves upon closerinspection to be containers for shadowy worlds populated byminiature beings and their tiny belongings: a room full of unclaimedluggage, an inscrutable domestic exchange, a kept critter. Thoughthe boxes share similar features such as slats, holes and windows,a simple rotation transforms their functions: an oculus becomes apond for fishing, cell bars become blinds to peer through. Viewingthese collective moments reproduces the experience of intimacyat a distance that is a hallmark of city dwelling.
As Susan Stewart has pointed out, miniatures have the capacity tointerrupt our perception of space and time. "In its tableaulike form,"she writes, "the miniature is a world of arrested time; its stillnessemphasizes the activity that is outside its borders. And this effectis reciprocal, for once we attend to the miniature world, the outsideworld stops and is lost to us."1 As we are compelled empathicallytowards these tiny scenes, we are also made profoundly awareof our hierarchical distance and isolation from them. We arereminded of the simultaneity of other life, and, as the exhibition'stitle suggests, the precarity of our own.
Descending into the second gallery we are returned to our ownscale, but to a world that is not our own. We emerge into the marsh,another scene populated once more by small beings: canines,rats, birds and insects, but this time they are watching us and eachother. Following their gazes reveals tiny dramas acted out betweenpredator and prey. Since Laura Mulvey used psychoanalysis toconstruct her seminal theory of the male gaze, scholars haveturned to question the limits of an anthropocentric perspectivealtogether. Whereas a human-centered gaze is predicated on thenotion of a single world inhabited by a hierarchy of living beings,we might instead consider perspectives held by other forms of life.As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has suggested, "the fly, thedragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunnyday do not move in the same world as the one in which we observethem, nor do they share with us—or with each other—the same timeand same space."2 So too it is in the marsh, where a multitude ofworlds coexist across species. The dual environments that makeup prey allow us to imagine a world where humans are no longerobservers at the center of the universe, but rather interdependentwithin an ecology of living beings who watch us back.
—Marie Catalano
1. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, theSouvenir, the Collection, 1st paperback ed (Durham: Duke University Press,1993).
2. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 2003).
Press release courtesy Mennour. Text: Marie Catalano.
Mennour is an art gallery founded in Paris in 1999. Through its exhibitions, its projects developed in partnership with cultural institutions, its presence in major international art fairs, and its network of collaborators throughout the world, the gallery is present from Asia to the Americas, and from Africa to the Middle East. Today, it is one of the key actors in contemporary art and the art market.
