Sari Carel
« The Coyote After-School Program, 2019, 8 min
“We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human”
David Abram, « The Spell of the Sensuous »
« The Coyote After-School Program » explores language in its human and non-human forms. The film uses as its point of departure a 1970’s performance by Joseph Beuys, in which he spent three days cohabitating in a gallery with a wild coyote. Film documentation from this work is among the most iconic to come out of Beuys’s oeuvre, but possibly also the most problematic, because it features a stressed animal that is used as a prop and forced into Beuys’s world and his hermetic language.
The Coyote After-School revisits this moment in art history through a critical feminist lens and research on interspecies communication and animal personhood. The project is informed by my work with animals as a behaviorist alongside my art practice and focuses on a series of collaborative actions with a companion animal - one that can actually thrive in novel interactions with humans. During a day of filming at A.I.R. Gallery, the feminist art collective in Brooklyn, NY, Iris a rescue dog, and myself performed "A Quadratic Equation" by poet Robert Bringhurst as translated into a series of gestures and visual cues. Playful experimentation was the guiding force that day, both at the heart of the creative process but also as an essential element of how animals explore the world around them and thrive within it. SC
Based in Brooklyn, New York, much of multi-media artist Sari Carel’s work focuses on translation from one modality to another. Her projects consider interspecies communication, relationships between people and place, and how the senses inform our perception. Also an environmental activist, Sari is a sharp observer of ecosystems, be they natural or human.
Carel’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally in venues such as Artists Space, Dumbo Arts Festival, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; LAX Art and Young Projects in Los Angeles; Genia Schreiber University Gallery in Tel Aviv, and Haifa Museum of Art in Israel and Locust Projects in Miami. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, including AIR at the Stundars Museum, Finland; AIR Vienna; the Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency on Governors Island, New York; and the Bundanon Residency, in Australia.
Recent exhibitions include The Coyote After-School Program at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR and The Shape Of Play, a public art project in Boston’s North End, commissioned by JARTS and curated and produced by Now & There.