A trellis of a dog with the hide stretched over it. The next day it was gone. That is the dog he remembers.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Contributed by Adam Simon / I tend to rail against art openings. Few attendees of a crowded art opening ever get to really see the show; the glimpses they’re afforded are more like scrolling Instagram than anything approaching contemplation. I felt differently at the opening of Curtis Mitchell’s pop-up show “19 Black Dogs” at the untraditional talent agency called No Agency on Bowery. The work does lend itself to contemplation, but at the opening of this show, Mitchell’s sculptures – stuffed dogs he purchases on the internet and then abuses in various ways – were contextualized by a young, hip crowd, connected I assume to No Agency rather than to Mitchell. Some appeared to be fashion models.
If the anonymous models represent the personification of youth and desire, Mitchell’s black dogs represent mortality, corruption, rot. They are also beautiful. Having suffered untold degradation, ripped or burned or mangled, they persist in their doggy ways. They sniff, they gather, they convey their interest in one another and their obliviousness to humans in their midst. If you experience the exhibition without a crowd, you will be aware of their lack of interest in you, a lack of interest greater than that of most exhibited art.
Mitchell excels at this kind of inversion. One of my favorite pieces of his is a rifle that has been shot multiple times. Recently, he has been printing large-format versions of appropriated generic sunsets, ocean scenes, etc., tearing away much of the top printed layer so that the printed image struggles against the abstract white configuration of ripped shards, which is its undoing. In the past, he has altered or repurposed other stuffed animals, anonymous photos, reproductions of iconic paintings, and clips from well-known films.
The dogs, like the kitsch landscape photos, refer both to actual dogs and to a category of online merchandise. Mitchell’s process begins with acquisition, followed by sometimes violent manipulation, culminating in a reinsertion of the transformed object into the social matrix. Cast as art, the objects serve as disruptions, flies in the ointment of taste. What the work literally represents might be less important than the artist’s intention to disturb the viewer. The dogs were stuffed once, and their softness conveyed comfort. Now they are hollowed out, desiccated. Being life-sized, they could be mistaken for real in one’s peripheral vision.
Under Trump, “19 Black Dogs,” a collectivity marked by uniform blackness, could perhaps lose an academic exhibiting institution its federal funding. It’s not being exhibited in academia though, but in a fashion agency. This is a masterful decision by the curator, Alex Berns. Mitchell’s provocation is akin to that of a fashion icon like Vivienne Westwood or Jean Paul Gaultier, not reliant on articulated messaging, more focused on the formal, the associative, the subliminal.
“Curtis Mitchell: 19 Black Dogs,” No Agency, 123 Bowery, Floor 5, New York, NY. Through May 9, 2025. Open Wednesdays – Saturdays, 12pm-6pm.
About the author: Adam Simon is a New York artist and writer. His most recent solo painting show was at OSMOS in 2024.
