American Animals I

Jesse Shaw does not bother depicting anything other than what he sees. Jesse Shaw does not bother depicting exactly what we want to see. Although I, personally, haven’t seen his collection in the gallery at Austin Peay University, he grabbed the attention of my Art History teacher, who I’m pretty sure has seen a lot of art. His “American Animals I” is as up front as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. In a scheme of little blank space he depicts a snake enveloped by cicada-like bugs and skunks, monster-like ants dragging beavers demonically into their ant-hole, agitated interwoven bulls, fish carcasses below bears fishing in buckets, a crowded mass of screaming chickens, and group of feisty horses eating away at a whale carcass.
Although obviously open for interpretation, the work speaks to me about the treatment of American animals in a consumer society. The chickens recall a disturbing scene of the documentary “Food Inc.” in which the consumer of those McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets is confronted with the source. He says of the whale and shrimp motif: “your white whale and my white whale are shrimp to everyone else” (http://americanprintmaker.blogspot.com/) which speaks to me as our age of JUMBO shrimp—an apparent and disturbing oxymoron. His interwoven bulls appear as a hybrid, as if the previous form wasn’t sufficient. The skunks, cicadas and snake appear as jumbled road-kill. Jesse Shaw’s overall message of “American Animals I” may not be totally clear to the observer, but I think most can discern this view is not a pleasant one.