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Because Animals Need Gas Masks Too
This week Torontoist’s boy reporter found himself at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art’s new digs on Queen St. West. MOCCA made the move from North York in late fall but opened their first show, Safety Gear for Small Animals, at this space in January.
Safety Gear for Small Animals (SGSA) transforms the MOCCA into a museum for a fictional company that provides knee pads, gloves, prosthetics and gas masks for our furry and feathered friends. The artist, Bill Burns, even takes on the role of Director of the fictional company. The exhibit gives us an insight into the company’s many animal related activities: a safety gear prototype production division, a prosthetics programme and even its publishing department (read the gallery guide, it’s extremely well done).The result is a humorous and surreal blend of corporate PR spin, genuine consciousness-raising environmentalism and marvelously executed art.
Burns has crafted safety vests, firefighter hats, rubber gloves and bulletproof vests in diminutive anatomically correct animal sizes. He’s even made a series of claws, horns and other animal prosthetics. A prairie dog survival kit comes complete with a compass and everything else a threatened prairie dog would need to survive.
I particularly enjoyed the photos of dioramas along one wall of the show. In them plastic miniature polar bears, whales and other animals interact with the books on wildlife that make up their unnatural habitats. A polar bear hides amongst the white pages of books on the arctic, an orca leaps off the pages only to land beached among sentences and a group of bears and moose block a logging truck in what looks like an act of protest. Yet despite these humorous and playful statements about wildlife, Burns never quite dispels the air of menace and danger that characterize our dealings with wildlife, dealings that more often than not leads to an unpleasant end and makes the existence of an object as absurd as a prosthetic claws and animal-sized bulletproof vests all too plausible.
