Chicago photographer Colleen Plumb’s new exhibition Animals Are Outside Today, which opened at Jen Bekman Gallery in Soho on Friday, is a series of strange and often slightly hyper-real images of animals – everything from circus elephants to the decaying corpse of a raccoon. As a body of work, Animals Are Outside Today explores the complex and often contradictory relationship between humans and animals: as the artist’s statement says, “We love and admire [animals]; we are entertained and fascinated by them; we take our children to watch and learn about them… At the same time, we eat, wear and cage them with seeming indifference, consuming them, and images of them, in countless ways.” Like all the best art, it’s both moving and thought-provoking. Click through to see a gallery of some of Plumb’s work.
