Artificially reconstructed habitats
The poor animal looks distressed: an elephant in an inner-city zoo has one of its legs caught in a car tyre hanging from a tree, and shifts around awkwardly on three legs, pushing and pulling seemingly getting more and more stuck. It looks like the kind of dumb trouble that dumb animals get into, a spectacle of feckless suffering that draws our sentimental compassion, a feeling of mingled helplessness and complicity. In the gallery viewers quietly gasp in sympathy.
But look, on the next screen, another couple of dumb animals. They have huge crimson feathers sprouting from the tops of their heads, and they spend hour after hour standing in the hot sun in the middle of a busy square in the tourist section of Rome. Every now and then a group of tourists climbs up and poses next to them, for the brief moment required to point and click. Poor bastards, it sure looks hot in those centurion uniforms.
Irish artist Finola Jones's Artificially Reconstructed Habitats involves twenty-one video monitors and two video projections showing humans and animals engaged in various forms of constrained or repetitive action. The videos loop continuously, with blank screens of different colours punctuating each sequence like a painterly form of colour coding. Like the video loop, each individual vignette features static or circular behaviours: a middle-aged man wades obsessively around a tiny swimming pool; a giraffe distractedly munches from a trompe-l'oeil feeder disguised as African savannah; a toy mouse in a tutu turns pirouettes; a zebra blinks in the sun outside its concrete enclosure; a uniformed cop, white-gloved like Mickey Mouse, stands on a tiny striped roundabout directing traffic with gestures of faintly hysterical