Earth Suits & Beast Machines

Jennifer Amadeo-Holl & Mike Libby

July 24 - September 13

About the Show

Placing Jennifer Amadeo-Holl’s Earth Suits paintings in dialogue with Mike Libby’s sculpture in Earth Suits & Beast Machines is visually exciting and evokes some of the most mysterious and fascinating topics of our time: the true nature of consciousness; humans’ interconnectedness with the earth and all of nature; and the ethical and ecological implications of both.

Earth Suits implies the existence of a transcendent consciousness separate from but aware of the body it inhabits on earth. Amadeo-Holl’s treatment of her animal subjects seems both to endow them with this type of consciousness and to draw out its similarities to our own. Her subjects are endearing and whimsical, but a waft of gravitas is also present. These beings are all humanlike -- an appeal, perhaps, for the human viewer to see “I” in the animal “other.” To acknowledge animal sentience, to show compassion for their plight, and to recognize that their right to exist is equal to our own.

Libby’s intricate sculptures incorporate found material and, like Amadeo-Holl’s paintings, seem to exist at the intersection of charming quirk and gravitas. At first glance, these built, mechanical animals could appear a literalization of Descartes’s conception of “beast machines,” wherein he postulated that only humans are sentient and capable of knowing pain: It seems reasonable since art copies nature, and men can make various automata which move without thought, that nature should produce its own automata much more splendid than the artificial ones. These natural automata are the animals. Their cries, thus, analogous not to humans’ pain response, but to the “squeaky cogs” of machines.

On an optimistic note, Libby’s use of the residual debris of rampant consumerism is a nod to human resilience and ingenuity – and to the possibility of a technological save. But these built animals and humanoid figures also evoke robots and AI. And with that, a new dimension of ethical and philosophical considerations pertaining to consciousness. And, perhaps, a future where AI becomes self-determinant enough to see humans as nature’s automata. Mere “beast machines.”

Read the review in Art Spiel

Featured Artists

Featured

Mike Libby

I think of the work I make as dense short stories—compact and layered, where nuances of character, plot, and setting inform each piece’s structure and theme.

Jennifer Amadeo-Holl

My imagery and love of language reach back to my childhood, and are rooted in a love of color and a fascination with faces, vessels, and hands and feet, which often work as architecture in my paintings.