Intelligent Design
Interspecies Art

Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art is a group exhibition of twenty international artists exploring human interaction with animals through a collection of provocative video installations, photographs, paintings, and sculptures.

Artists in the exhibition collaborate with cockroaches, pigeons, dogs, cats, ants, bears, baboons, rats, spiders, trout, and other species, which may be domesticated, imaginary, laboratory, modeled, or wild. Curious about the animal's point of view, artists design their projects as a form of conversation or inquiry about the nonhuman world. Their artwork challenges the anthropocentric perspective of the world, placing human perception on par with other animals. Inspired by Darwin, the environmental movement, and species collapse, Intelligent Design envisions a paradigm shift in which human beings are no longer the center of the Universe.

The exhibition will also stimulate discussions about the differences and similarities of how the arts and sciences approach the world, animals as products, animal rights, conservation, and speciesism, as a form of prejudice against animals. Intelligent Design will be the first exhibition in the U.S. to explore interspecies art, coming on the heels of several exhibitions and conferences in the UK this year that explored the topic in light of this year's 200-year celebration of Charles Darwin's birth.

Organized by UCR Sweeney Art Gallery, and curated by gallery director, Tyler Stallings, and artist/independent curator, Rachel Mayeri.

About the curators

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist and independent curator working at the intersection of science and art. Mayeri programmed the anthology Soft Science, distributed by Video Data Bank, and her essay "Soft Science: Artists' Experiments with Science Documentary" is published in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience (MIT Press, 2008). She is a guest curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Further information can be found at http://www.soft-science.org/mayeri.html.

Tyler Stallings is the director of UCR's Sweeney Art Gallery. He was chief curator at Laguna Art Museum from 1999 to 2006. Since arriving at Sweeney in 2007, he has organized Your Donations Do Our Work: Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy (2009), Absurd Recreation: Contemporary Art from China (2008), Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture (2008), and The Signs Pile Up: Paintings by Pedro Álvarez (2008), among others.