Toronto
Beastliness characterizes the sculptures in David Harper’s recent exhibition “Entre le chien et le loup,” running the gamut from the animal as disguise to the animal as keepsake or memento—all of which has to do with an aesthetic inquiry into our devaluation and trivialization of the natural world. Such work comes with intensely personal baggage, provoking a range of visceral responses that might extend from the innocuousness of a warm and fuzzy remembrance of, say, childhood Halloweens spent hiding behind a gorilla mask to stuff far more adult and unsettling. At the seemingly innocuous end of the scale is A Fear of Unknown Origin (all works are 2012), an installation consisting of a wall-mounted grid of 72 clay masks that includes representations of gorillas, wolves, foxes, pigs, oxen, and horned sheep.…see the entire review in the print version of September’s Sculpture magazine.
