The Dog and Pony Show considers the complicated place dogs and horses occupy in human life, moving between companion and property, individual and archetype, living creature and cultural image.
The exhibition takes its title from the traveling entertainments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which trained animals performed for paying audiences. The phrase later became shorthand for a presentation in which spectacle threatens to eclipse substance. Bringing together painting, drawing, sculpture, and video, the exhibition looks at how dogs and horses are trained, staged, remembered, and made to carry human ideas about freedom, power, devotion, domesticity, and belonging. Across the works, animals readily accommodate our projections while retaining something irreducibly their own.
