About the Rabbits

It’s ironic to write about my own art because the whole reason I make the art is that I lack the words to describe what I’m feeling or thinking. When required, I write around the art and then I write up to the point that words fail me and then I stop, but with an ellipsis. 

I do want to “write around” the rabbit installation I made during Covid because it was important art to me, but only about 50 people saw the show. It was supposed to be a small experiment but Covid shut us down on top of that.

A bit of background: I was the kid who loved animals. I read all of the books about animals, all of the animal stories of the day (Watership Down, Mrs. Frisby and The Rats of Nimh). I saved my allowance to join Bat Conservation International.

I also cherished my plush animal toys, lining them up on either side of my bed pillow making only a narrow sliver of space in the middle for myself. (Back in my day, we called them stuffed animals. When did that change? Did “stuffed animals” just sound too gruesome?)

I know I’m hardly alone in my childhood love of animals. As an artist, the question that interested me is how we humans square this childhood love of other species with the unconscionable cruelty we, as adults, inflict on them. I heard once that the great institutionalized cruelty of our age is factory farming. Arguably, this is true. There are, no doubt, other candidates. 

In this art installation, I created 24 paper and silk rabbits using the same pattern I used as a child to make plush animal toys for myself. The surface of each rabbit is adorned with imagery that describes how we humans use or conceptualize rabbits, from lab animals, food and fur to mythical creatures, storybook characters, and cultural icons (like the Playboy bunny.) In each instance, we humans ignore that actual rabbits have families, feelings, thoughts, history, habits, routines and friends. My question was along the lines of “when does a rabbit just get to be a rabbit?”  But, also, this cruelty, this dehumanization…wait…there is no equivalent word for dehumanizing when the living creature isn’t human. That alone says volumes. 

This cruelty, this “dehumanizing”, isn’t just for rabbits or animals, but also for the environment at large. What would happen if English had an equivalent word for “dehumanizing” that applied to living beings or entities that aren’t human? Would that change us?

Here is the point at which the words and ideas stumble and collide in my brain and the art takes over. Here’s my installation, “A Rabbit Named _______”...