100 Stags
A curatorial proposal

There has been a ubiquity of the deer motif in recent culture. Not only the great taxidermied stags, but depictions of super cute fawns, or coquettish does as well. This does not connect to just one stream of ideological or aesthetic thought, but comes from all corners for all purposes, in most media and for a variety of politics and aesthetics.

They can be conservative indications of survivalist tendencies (hunting magazines and catalogs) or radical critiques of institutions (Amy Stein's C-Prints of natural history museums) or gender (Ann Craven paintings of does). They can be super butch (Paul Koepikin, taking photos in a Billings Montana Best Western) or hopelessly twee (the recent fawn toys made by Sanrio). They can be strange and new (the psychedelic floral intertwined with cut-outs) done by Hanna Wearing) or the end result of hundreds of years of traditions (the Irish Royal Elk emblazoned on t shirts by Squidfire) They can be lo-fi like recent rave posters done for Minnesota clubs and they can be the height of slick post-modern commerce (the video sequel to Bambi).

That's the best thing; they can be everything for anyone. In the last five years you saw men and women from dozens of countries making deeply personal or deeply whorish depictions of deer, meaning anything. It evades theory and it evades aesthetics. In my research I have found taxidermy, graphic design, stuffed animal, couture, suit jackets, t shirts, a dozen different kinds of photography, performance pieces, videos, paintings in every size imaginable, posters, flyers, prints, drawings, hand knitted, sewn, crocheted, and stuffed crafts, collage, wall paper, and various other materials (horn, silver, pewter, wood).

People like deer, and they see more and more of them when suburbs edge further into disappearing wilderness. I think the explosion of all kinds of deer motifs, in all sorts of places, in all sorts of politics, is a way of finding out what cities mean. They are amongst the best adaptors for invasion of cities, and they are cute or regal or beautiful or sublime enough that the real damage they are capable of isn't often known. I want us to start thinking about deer, what deer mean to the larger urban/suburban/rural dynamic.

I want to find 100 different examples of this deer motif, each of them symbolizing a different media, done by artists in cities, in suburbs and in rural areas. Items that have been hand made, made in small quantities, and mass-produced commercially. I want to combine high art, low art, tasteful design, and kitsch. I want to walk into that back room of Magic Pony, and be overwhelmed to the point of blunt silence, away from ironic kitsch, decorative skill, boredom or overkill. I want pictures of hunters as much as I want children's toys.

In actually getting together 100 fawn/stag/does on the walls, I hope to destabilize taste, decentralize people's patterns of cohesion and thought, and to perhaps foster new kinds of thoughts, away from the ghettos of clichéd represtentation.