Between you and me

Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir (Iceland) & Mark Wilson (USA) are internationally renowned artists who are exhibiting their work at PODspace Gallery in Newcastle as part of the Minding Animals Conference 2009.

Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson are a collaborative, research-based and socially-engaged artists whose art practice centre’s on projects that explore issues of history, culture and environment in relation to both humans and non-human animals. They work in installation, text, photographic and video-based media.

The video installation ‘between you and me’ examines a contemporary set of relationships between humans and seals, with its particular focus on the coastal areas of Iceland where interaction of one sort or another has been customary for many centuries.

Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson have for some time in their art work been examining specific relationships between human and non-human animals – in nanoq: flat out and bluesome the polar bear, in Big Mouth the Tasmanian Tiger, in (a)fly urban pets etc. (see website for more details http://www.snaebjornsdottirwilson.com/)

Most representations of animals are constructed to perform some agenda of our own – in the case of animals, to entertain, to inform, to provide food, to remember, to stand for all others of its species, to symbolize human behavioural characteristics
etc. In this process, the animal itself is locked out – eclipsed by its avatar or likeness, which is always a simplification and therefore must accordingly signify a loss.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s work challenges the anthropocentric systems of convenience that sanction a daily acceptance of such loss and posits the alternative idea of parities in meeting.

This exhibition centres on representations and the intrinsic value of things and calls into question the myriad bases upon which we construct representations of animals & our relationship to them.

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