We framed the oversized Kiki Smith piece for this show.

SDSU Gallery Art Director Tina Yapelli is also hosting the following lecture this Thursday in conjunction with the “Animalkind” show.

John Divola at San Diego State University – Thursday, March 5 at 4:00 p.m.

Visiting artist John Divola will present an illustrated lecture on Thursday, March 5 at 4:00 p.m. in Room 412 of SDSU’s School of Art, Design and Art History in conjunction with the exhibition “animalkind.” The Gallery will be open following the lecture until 6:00 p.m. The lecture and exhibition are FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC. The exhibition continues at the Gallery through May 6.

About the Artist Since 1988, John Divola has been a professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. His photographs have been featured in more than sixty solo exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico and Australia. His work has also been featured in more than two hundred group exhibitions worldwide at prestigious museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. Divola’s photographs were first seen at the University Art Gallery in 1995 in the exhibition “Staging: The Prefrabricated Image.” It is an honor to welcome him and his work back to San Diego State University for “animalkind.”

About the Work Seven photographs from John Divola’s series “Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert” are included in “animalkind.” In these grainy black-and-white images free-roaming canines sprint, leap and cavort as they pursue the artist’s moving car through sparsely populated neighborhoods in the southern California desert. The game is on, and the dogs’ intensity, urgency and exhilaration are palpably conveyed. These portraits, composed by chance as Divola held his camera out the window with one hand while steering with the other, reveal the potency of domesticated dogs’ primal instinct to chase their fleeing, albeit in this case mechanical, prey.