Joianne Bittle & Tamas Veszi

“To the Others” is a two-person show about selected animal species very different from us, transformed through drawings, paintings and a video piece. Here, questions can be considered about how we as humans exist alongside these animals, control, imprint and/or project our thoughts onto other species.

For the show, the title (others) refers to the term “constitutive others” used in philosophy, which is a general concept of different identities (usually between people) often hidden from our subjective perspectives. “To Other” means to place ourselves outside of the center, somewhere along the margin of what we see in everyday society.

Included by Joianne Bittle are two works of a separate metameric, cold-blooded invertebrate species, the centipede, and a close relative perhaps. Each recalls her recent field studies from the Chihuahuan Desert and consider the evolutionary timeline of myriapoda – the oldest known terrestrial animals in the fossil record.

Tamas Veszi Relative Proximity in Nature

At night the animals come out, and make the darkness conscious. Hidden behind the camouflage of the transparent truth. The darkness becomes the foreground, and the bestiaries of the night could become the background. In-between, there is the shadow and the uncertainty of the subconscious reality.

There is an unexpected turn in the paintings, where the surface and the chemistry reveled the subject, more specifically and surprisingly: animals, domestic and wild, dormant and previously uninteresting to him. He constantly raises questions. Why these animals? How are they becoming important over all and also as a singular abstract organic element in his work?