Exhibit of the week: Dead or Alive

Museum of Arts and Design, New York

Through Oct. 24

The artworks in the Museum of Arts and Design’s new exhibition don’t just imitate life, said Miranda Siegel in New York. They actually incorporate once-living things. These “creepy-icky” creations from some 30 artists all feature “flora and fauna in various states of dormancy and decay,” and the resulting show often resembles a surreal natural history display. Claire Morgan arranges the carapaces of bluebottle flies in “geometrical sculptures suspended from the ceiling,” such as the cube-like On Top of the World (2009). Christiane Löhr places lighter-than-air thistle seeds into a sac that resembles an “enormous hairnet” and reacts to each passing breeze. Simen Johan has cobbled feathers and other animal matter into an “entity resembling an avian Cousin Itt.”

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Other unusual media employed here include “mouse skeletons, silkworm cocoons, kelp, emu feathers, and fast-food chicken bones,” said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. Such ingredients may seem better suited to a “witches’ brew” than to a museum exhibition, so you’d certainly expect that artists fond of such raw materials would produce decidedly morbid work. In fact, “the show’s more playful than macabre.” Kate MccGwire has crafted pigeon feathers “into a giant arc that creates the illusion of spouting water.” One of Damien Hirst’s “butterfly paintings” arranges the insects’ blue wings into an abstract pattern resembling stained glass. Billie Grace Lynn’s Mad Cow Motorcycle—“a bovine skeleton attached to a motorized bicycle frame”—is accompanied by a helmet decorated with udders. “While the art is made of things that are no longer living, the show is certainly lively.”

Many works also strive not just to be clever but to make a point, said Jordan Galloway in The New York Press. Christy Rupp, the artist who works with chicken bones, pieces them into life-size skeletons of extinct birds. “Meant as a meditation on the way humans devour our environments,” her works suggest that wasteful processes like industrial chicken farming are the product of the same insatiable human appetites that “caused birds like the dodo to die off in the first place.” While a few of the artists represented here may “see organics simply as another material,” they have inspired Rupp and others to take death itself as a subject. At their best, their works “appear more reverent than revolting” and even evoke a certain spiritual awe.