The Peaceable Queendom

Wexler Gallery
Philadelphia, PA
Mar. 5-May 1, 2010

In Adelaide Paul's sculpture, polarities of perfection and imperfection, nature and artifice, and wholeness and incompleteness find a balance. Fantastical yet anatomically drawn from life, the familiar mammals she creates are elegant and often charming, while incorporating what many would regard as ugliness: death presented in the form of a trophy, or mutilation and injury.

Paul stitches intricate patterns of leather over animal forms manufactured for taxidermy. Intended to support the skins of real animals, the taxidermy mannequins are life-size and accurate in the details of musculature. Paul covers them with skin-not what we would expect in a living animal, but tanned, hairless, dyed leather, relieved only by seams resembling the stitching on a baseball in miniature. The symmetrical piecing and execution are stunning in their perfection. It is just barely possible to detect the slight variation between machine-stitching done by Paul before the skin is glued to the body and the hand-stitching she uses for finer details on the body of the animal.

Paul takes what is in essence a flayed animal and further deconstructs it by altering it in some unmistakable way. For Regarding Entropy, 2010, she removed the head of the horse form and hung it on the wall at about the height where it would naturally be. With alertly pricked ears, the horse appears to be "regarding" its own headless body. Formally echoing the backing of a wall-mounted sports trophy, a worn leather horse collar encircles the neck. However, the collar was made for a plow horse, not the sleek, most likely quarter horse, model Paul chose. The horse is covered, eyes, hooves and all, with an almost plausible-for a horse-cognac brown, unrelieved by color variations.

In Un Di Felice, 2008, named for the famous love duet in Verdi's La Traviata, a sleek whippet-like iridescent purple dog is missing a foreleg, but that does not initially strike a viewer as strongly as the dog's narrow, raised muzzle and toothless, wide-stretched mouth. Is it yawning or is it howling its love for an implied owner? A close look reveals that the dog has only one foreleg. Unlike other seams in the work, the one encircling the flat plane of the amputation is composed of sutures.

According to gallerist Lewis Wexler, Paul partly based All of My Lovers Have Blue Eyes, 2009, a dog with an awkwardly healed broken leg, on one of her own pets. This work, with its anxious, pale lidless eyes, the only glass eyes in the show, effectively illustrates one of Paul's overriding themes: human-animal relationships dominated by humans. In addition to what might be an accidental injury, the dog seems to have a docked tail. Its ears are stubs. Though perhaps features of the original mannequin (allowing for a dead animal's ears to be attached), they remind us of the still-extant practice of mutilating pets to achieve a perverse idea of beauty. The whole figure communicates the assumption that animals are commodities and that we have the right to do with them as we please. In the Western world we often regard pets with exaggerated sentimentality-until their infirmities exceed their charms. Then they are put down, to be replaced by younger models.

A mountain lion and ungulates of various stamps are included in Paul's "Peaceable Queendom." All manifest a hybridization that is sensuous, alluring and treacherous. Paul trained as a ceramist and regards the knowledge of animal anatomy, which enables her to teach the subject to veterinary students, as essential to her sculpture.

In what could be considered the most ambitious work in the exhibition, The Artificial Queendom, a pale dog, perhaps another whippet, gallops to the end of a flower-covered wedge jutting out from the wall. The sleek animal stumbles forward, certain to fall. It has the antlers of a small deer, suggesting that it is prey rather than hunter, and a panting, delicately curling tongue hand-built of porcelain. It looks almost plausible, but nothing is remotely natural in this vignette. Its curious, stylized quality falls between nature and what we can make of nature. It suggests the unique contradictory whole of Paul's skillful, seductively confrontational practice.

Robin Rice is an adjunct associate professor at the University of the Arts, where she has taught craft history.