The urge to identify with animals is as old as humankind itself. The symbiotic reliance we share with other species has been honored, celebrated, feared and respected for millennia. The creative visual expression of this relationship runs from the caves of Lascaux to the current fascination in popular culture with vampires, werewolves and other fantastic hybrids of nature and the imagination. They are us: Animal Identity and the Anthropomorphic Urge gathers the work of six disparate artists who use animal imagery in their work to reflect upon human characteristics that separate us from the animals while ultimately serving to connect us as well. This is the first multidiscipline group exhibition hosted at RWFA with painting, works on paper, sculpture and of course, photography.

Meghan Boody has always incorporated animal and dream imagery in her fantastic digital composite fantasies. Fate and transformation are repeated themes in her narrative series where human characters morph into creatures or grow animal features. Her latest series, Psyche and the Beast is an extension of her earlier Psyche and Smut which explored a psychological splitting personified by two sisters with opposing personalities. Psyche and the Beast, a fairy tale of vampiric love, imprisonment and redemption, unfolds in an underground world. In Magie Noire, Psyche is the hostess to the Beast at a banquet where the atmosphere is leaden with a not so subtle sexual tension. White Shoulders finds Psyche preparing herself, resplendent in an elegant red satin gown, sporting a new found tail. Exquisitely beautiful and disturbingly unsettling, this work updates the Gothic novel with a penchant for Victorian photocollage in the digital age.

Kate Clark, a sculptor working with taxidermy, sculpts, then melds, human faces onto the bodies of animals, whose skins are reincarnated and preserved as totally new beasts that are not so distant relatives of ours. Her most recent works are featured. They are also her most ambitious to date, selectively shaving the skins of these hybrid creatures to allow the body more prominence. Also, for the first time she has forsaken the sculpture’s base. Gallant, a running antelope with a handsome male face, hangs from the ceiling. As true as a photograph and as ephemeral as a dream, Gallant defies gravity, clearly stating the artist’s deep intention - to displace our species’ need for believing in what is with what might be.

Kumie Tsuda , a Japanese artist recently relocated to Los Angeles, encounters in her strange new environment small mammals and rodents never before faced in her native land. Squirrels, opossums, coyotes and raccoons share the land outside her studio and become the inspiration for an empathetic exploration of these odd new subjects. Appropriately, her sculpture is executed in the most elemental of materials: fired clay. The accompanying drawings are done in pastel - pigments so weightless they float on the paper with a tentative hold on their support. Regardless, the studies feel as expressive and as immediate as the artist’s hand can form them. Included are several animal studies with related ceramic sculpture.

Tanja Verlak , a doctoral candidate at the Royal College of Art, photographed in and around zoos in Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2007. In Zoo, her caged subjects are the pathos of confinement, an anthropomorphized panoply of fear, longing, frustration and solitude. Eschewing photography’s natural tendency towards prolific production, each image is carefully considered and exquisitely printed, reflections in silvery grays and deep ebony blacks that resonate with the quiet turmoil of the emotional transference inherent in the imagery.

Tanja Verlak is currently involved in a PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art. Her research focus is the representation of culturally determined shock and the phenomenon of magical in photography. She holds a BA and an MA degree in Documentary Photography from FAMU, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and an Master of Philosophy from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

During her studies she was a visiting lecturer at the Jamia Millia Islamia University, Mass Communication Research Centre and a speaker at the Devi Art Foundation. She has recently obtained an assistant professorship and lectures in MA Photography Courses at the French Institute of Design and Communication Arts in Mumbai, India.

Verlak exhibits and publishes internationally. Some locations include Camera Austria International, Graz, Austria; Paris Photo, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen, Siegen, Germany; Revolver Revue, Prague, Czech Republic; and the National Museum of Photography / CZ, Prague, Czech Republic.

She has received numerous awards and nominations and is a recipient of various scholarships, such as Zois Scholarship and the Tata Grant.

Christian Vogt , a Swiss photographer, is known for his complex, Surreal and incisive colorful interplays of the unexpected. Represented in this show by works from his fictional series, The Flaxen Diary, a fiercely growling chihuahua seems to guard his home, unaware he is a pawn in Vogt’s purely photographic invention. The menacing dog is echoed in a painting on the wall above him with a pair of spindly dog legs. Also included is Sugar Rabbit a tender study of a gummy candy in wrappers where a hunter and a rabbit kiss and are joined at the lips.

Martin Wittfooth , a young but established painter from New York, devises scenes where animals dominate the human world both as victims and heroic survivors of the ecological, economic and political disasters that have stained the Earth we are forced to live in. In past works, his brood has been painted in the midst of fires from oil spills, rising above urban sprawl, raising their young in the splendid interiors of well apportioned homes but nowhere do human figures ever enter the canvas. Evidence of humankind is everywhere but they are absent from the scene. Smoking Barrels, his most recent work painted for the exhibition, is a seemingly simple image yet clues permeate that show the painter’s intelligent and subtle use of symbolic references. Smoke wafts from the tips of a rhinoceros’ horns and a portion of a blood-red, freely painted target is emblazoned on the doomed animal’s hide.