You’re trapped like a deer in the headlights…you can’t run from the upcoming show at Like the Spice. We hope it don’t run you down.

Images of animals have been increasingly prevalent in contemporary art recently…you can’t spit at an art fair without hitting two deer, a bear and probably a sasquatch. Exploring the urgency animal representations have had recently, this show includes works that explore several different aspects of the relationship between animals and culture.

In some works animals stand in for people, they are vulnerable or ferocious in ways that reveal more about the human condition than about the animals themselves. This is the Disney approach, where animals are used to illuminate character types and traits. An owl becomes a wise old man and a fox is always the trickster. Other works use animal imagery for its psychological associations: totemic symbols for forces of nature, threatening or shamanistic, these animals confront us with their unpredictability and archetypical wildness. The unsettling sight of eels crawling over each other. The horror of confronting a predator in the wilderness. This psychological take is complimented by an approach that recognizes our tenuous and mediated contemporary relationship with nature as commodity, test subject, lifestyle accessory and fashion trope. The first dogs in space. The kitten as makeout voyeur. These ideas of course inform and resist each other and some works borrow aspects of each mode.

In the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog, animals cannot help but be what they are…this show asks whether people are any different or whether animals are really that transparent.

This show includes works by Undine Brod, Thomas Clark, Seth Cohen, Cair Crawford, Ondine Wolfe Crispin, Allison Edge, Brendan Fernandes, Abby Goodman, Jason Head, Amy Hill, Tatiana Kronberg, Max Liboiron, Eric LoPresti, Johnna MacArthur, Philip Simmons, Steven Tabbutt, Grace Teng and Chadwick Whitehead.

With a special closing performance Friday January 11th 2008, 7:30-10:00pm by Castle Critters.