To live in a densely populated environment is to be on view while viewing others; to exchange intimate moments with strangers. Elizabeth Jaeger’s curiously animate clay worlds reflect the psychological effects that accompany this experience of looking and being looked at. Sculpted by hand, her objects and beings embody the effects of the gaze through a number of distortions including scale shifts, fragmentation, and anthropomorphization. These expressive traits impose an indistinct fluidity between figures, beings and things. If looking often implies a relationship of power, Jaeger’s objects complicate expected hierarchies between humans and our surroundings.
This shift between observer and observed is central to “prey,” which unfolds across two distinct environments. In the first, a series of black cubes line the walls of the gallery. What appear here first as stark, minimalist sculptures reveal themselves upon closer inspection to be containers for shadowy worlds populated by miniature beings and their tiny belongings: a room full of unclaimed luggage, an inscrutable domestic exchange, a kept critter. Though the boxes share similar features such as slats, holes and windows, a simple rotation transforms their functions: an oculus becomes a pond for fishing, cell bars become blinds to peer through. Viewing these collective moments reproduces the experience of intimacy at a distance that is a hallmark of city dwelling.
As Susan Stewart has pointed out, miniatures have the capacity to interrupt our perception of space and time. “In its tableaulike form,” she writes, “the miniature is a world of arrested time; its stillness emphasizes the activity that is outside its borders. And this effect is reciprocal, for once we attend to the miniature world, the outside world stops and is lost to us.” 1 As we are compelled empathically towards these tiny scenes, we are also made profoundly aware of our hierarchical distance and isolation from them. We are reminded of the simultaneity of other life, and, as the exhibition’s title suggests, the precarity of our own.
Descending into the second gallery we are returned to our own scale, but to a world that is not our own. We emerge into the marsh, another scene populated once more by small beings: canines, rats, birds and insects, but this time they are watching us and each other. Following their gazes reveals tiny dramas acted out between predator and prey. Since Laura Mulvey used psychoanalysis to construct her seminal theory of the male gaze, scholars have turned to question the limits of an anthropocentric perspective altogether. Whereas a human-centered gaze is predicated on the notion of a single world inhabited by a hierarchy of living beings, we might instead consider perspectives held by other forms of life. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has suggested, “the fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us—or with each other—the same time and same space.” 2 So too it is in the marsh, where a multitude of worlds coexist across species. The dual environments that make up “prey” allow us to imagine a world where humans are no longer observers at the center of the universe, but rather interdependent within an ecology of living beings who watch us back.
—Marie Catalano
at Kamel Mennour, Paris
until February 3, 2024