Main Projects is pleased to present The Dog and Pony Show, a group exhibition featuring Karl Haendel, Sophie Larrimore, Shona McAndrew, Claire HarnEnz, Benji Grignon, Laird Gough, and Monsieur Zohore.
The phrase “dog and pony show” originated with the traveling entertainments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which trained animals performed for paying audiences. It has since become shorthand for an elaborate presentation whose polish may exceed its substance. In this exhibition, however, the dogs and horses are quite literally present.
Few animals are as thoroughly entangled in human life. We keep them close, train them, breed them, work alongside them, and assign them both monetary and emotional value. We also ask them to stand for ideas far larger than themselves. The horse signifies freedom and power, but also privilege, wealth, masculinity, and the mythology of the American West. The dog is more often associated with devotion, companionship, domesticity, status, and family. Both move continually between living creature and cultural image, intimate presence and human projection.
In Claire HarnEnz’s paintings, horses appear against suburban fencing that also reads as theatrical scenery. The landscape of the American West becomes a backdrop, while doubled horses approach emblem, mirror, or Rorschach. Her works turn on a familiar contradiction: the horse as an enduring symbol of freedom that is nevertheless owned, trained, fenced, and controlled.
Karl Haendel likewise revisits inherited images of animals and power. His monumental Rodeo drawings reconsider the overwhelmingly masculine tradition of Western imagery through female rodeo riders, rearranging its familiar codes of mastery and heroism. In Pup with Flowers, a meticulously rendered dog encounters a vase and flowers drawn in loose, schematic lines. The unlikely pairing reflects Haendel’s interest in juxtaposition, and in the ways images alter one another when brought into unexpected company.
For Benji Grignon, the horse is at once less symbolic and more elusive. Horses preceded painting in his life, and after years of working professionally with them, he has known hundreds individually. He paints largely from memory and intuition, allowing a particular horse, an amalgamation of several, or an entirely imagined figure to emerge through the process. His animals belong as much to recollection and the sublime as to observation. They appear not simply as representations but as presences, deeply familiar and never entirely knowable.
Sophie Larrimore approaches the animal as a means of reordering painting itself. Dogs have long provided a structure through which she explores composition, texture, color, and form, but these new works allow chance and revision to enter more visibly into the process. Bodies, animals, and gestures overlap, interrupt, and partially obscure one another. In Double Fall, a construction of painted cardboard, that instability enters physical space as figures and shapes accumulate like actors, props, and scenery on a crowded stage.
In Shona McAndrew’s paintings, dogs appear alongside women in scenes of rest, play, and everyday companionship. In The Nap, Bathers, and Somewhere Only We Know, the women seem completely at ease, while the dogs contribute to the sense of comfort and safety that surrounds them. McAndrew has long depicted women in spaces where they are free from scrutiny; here, companionship with animals becomes part of that freedom.
For Laird Gough, the animal arrives through material and memory. Her paintings incorporate porcelain, stoneware, plaster, eggshells, glaze, and fragments embedded within their surfaces, extending a practice built around breaking, rebuilding, and preserving traces of what came before. Helga, named for her grandmother’s dog, draws the animal into personal history. Black Horse bears the phrase “staring me in the eye as if to say you are one of us.” In both works, recognition has less to do with likeness than with the uncanny feeling of encountering something remembered, inherited, or somehow already known.
In Monsieur Zohore’s video Puppy Passion, the artist, dressed as a dog, stages a canine Passion play in a public dog park. The park’s dogs become unwitting members of the cast, their spontaneous behavior folded into the work’s religious drama. Hovering between parody and pathos, the video makes literal the exhibition’s slippage between animal and actor, spectacle and ordinary life.
Throughout The Dog and Pony Show, dogs and horses appear as companions and possessions, individuals and archetypes, memories and performances. They readily accommodate our fantasies, even as some essential part of them remains beyond our command.
We name them, train them, breed them, paint them, remember them, and turn them into symbols. Yet they remain stubbornly themselves.
