The Coyote After-School Program, video projection (4K), 8 minutes, 2019

“We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human”

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

The Coyote After-School Program explores language in its human and non-human forms. The film uses as its point of departure a 1970's performance by Joseph Beuys, in which he spent three days cohabitating in a gallery with a wild coyote. Film documentation from this work is among the most iconic to come out of Beuys's oeuvre, but possibly also the most problematic, because it features a stressed animal that is used as a prop and forced into Beuys’s world and his hermetic language.
The Coyote After-School revisits this moment in art history through a critical feminist lens and research on interspecies communication and animal personhood. The project is informed by my work with animals as a behaviorist alongside my art practice and focuses on a series of collaborative actions with a companion animal - one that can actually thrive in novel interactions with humans. During a day of filming at A.I.R. Gallery, the feminist art collective in Brooklyn, NY, Iris a rescue dog, and myself performed "A Quadratic Equation" by poet Robert Bringhurst as translated into a series of gestures and visual cues. Playful experimentation was the guiding force that day, both at the heart of the creative process but also as an essential element of how animals explore the world around them and thrive within it.