Wild/Tame Artist Talk, 2021

Bio

MICHAEL CAINES’s most recent exhibitions include “Untamed: The Unbearable Weight of Genius Cat Art” Los Angeles, “Mammalia” at Galerie Youn in Montreal, and “Volta NYC” with Katharine Mulherin, a solo art fair booth featured in the New York Times. Caines has been selected for a number of artist residencies, including the Santa Fe Art Institute and The Bemis Center. Past awards include fellowships from the Avery and Chalmers foundations. His book, Revelations & Dog, a graphic version of the Book of Revelations, was released in March, 2010. A ten year survey of his animal and human themed work, Wild/Tame, was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Peterborough in Canada in 2011.

For any inquiries please use the form below.

Artist Statement

My current work satirically critiques themes of power and privilege, portraying domesticated animals posed against backdrops drawn from historical paintings. In one picture a hen sits in the corner of a cropped Boucher, while in another a Persian cat luxuriates in an armchair in an ad for reproductions of Louis XIV furniture. These self-aware animals pose with an earnestness customarily reserved for human portraiture. They serve as surrogates for their human owners; our tender companions as a compact reflection of ourselves. 

In “Louis”, I appropriated Rigaud’s eighteenth century portrait of Louis XIV, a painting that represents the height of European monarchic power. The royal figure is truncated, appearing only as a pair of stylish legs, with the king’s accoutrements of authority—his ample robes and bejeweled sword hilt—on obvious display. I have inserted a small dog, shifting the point of view by cropping the original painting, symbolically “decapitating” the king. Through this satirical work I examine my own complicit relationship with a history of painting I both admire and recognize as a symbolic iteration of class privilege and colonial oppression. Our decadent past is filtered through the eyes of the absurd figure of a pampered poodle, itself a decorative object removed from its natural state, and an avatar of our desires. In asking by way of reconsidering the past to question our fraught present, I am striving to smuggle a sharp point beneath layers of painted silk and fur.