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Inside Dominic Wilcox's art exhibition for dogs
British designer's new show features Frisbees, ballpits and canine-friendly paintings
Art is for everyone, or so they say, so there's no reason why an exhibition shouldn't be aimed at our canine pals.
British designer Dominic Wilcox has taken the concept of interactive art and applied it to our four-legged friends with the Play More exhibition of original paintings and multimedia exhibits by artists Nick White, Clare Mallison, Joanne Hummel-Newell, Robert Nicol and Michelle Thompson.
The installations include Cruising Canines, an open car-window simulator with a giant fan that wafts scents of old shoes and raw meat through the air – sure to delight and disgust in equal measure.
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Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Dinnertime Dreams is a 10ft dog bowl filled with more than 1,000 balls made to look like dog food, allowing pet pooches to frolic to their hearts' content.
The Watery Wonder exhibit features a series of dancing water jets that jump from one dog bowl to another for dogs to chase and then proceed to soak their human.
Catch, by Nick White, features an incredibly life-like Frisbee bouncing around a screen, while a series of paintings dotted around the exhibit use the grey-yellow-blue colour spectrum that dogs can see and depict dog-friendly subjects such as letters falling through a letterbox.
"Contemporary art has long been an important source of inspiration and fascination for humans, but never before has it been created with a view to drawing the same kind of emotions out of animals instead," says Wilcox.
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"While it’s certainly one of the more interesting challenges I’ve faced in my career, it feels great to have created such a truly unique collection of interactive artworks for a completely new audience."
The designer told Dezeen he was "deadly serious about being playful" - and not just in the canine world, urging creatives not to "worry about what other people think".
"I believe that playfulness in design – particularly at the beginning, at the ideas stage – is really important," he said.
Wilcox's other surreal inventions include a car made from stained glass and a series of absurd breakfast accessories to encourage children to eat in the mornings.
Play More was commissioned by More Than Pet Insurance as part of its campaign to encourage owners to spend more time playing with their pet.
