NEAR DWELLERS

A relatively unacknowledged but widespread crisis of human-animal encounters is that of roadkill: almost daily anyone who drives, or walks our roads and streets will see the flattened, squished, dismembered bodies of our fellow critters. By some accounts, the number of animals killed on highways each day in the United States alone exceeds 1,000,000.[1] As Jane Desmond asks, “How can something so ubiquitous be so absent from public discourse? What are the numerous rhetorical strategies and ideologies necessary to render invisible this enormous amount of animal carnage? What might it take to move these roadkilled bodies from the status of ‘unmourned’ to ‘mourned’?”[2]

The work of Lou Florence puts us on a path to engaging with these questions. Each work in this series of 19 paintings, although explicit in its referent, is sensitively rendered, inviting us to gaze more steadfastly at the ruined bodies of individual animals.

The images fix our attention on what is publicly deemed out of sight and indeed, out of mind: fur, skin, or feathers, entrails, and limbs are surrounded by a field of a subtle candy colour that turns this grizzly subject into a memorial of sorts, beckoning us to not only reflect upon but also quietly mourn the reality of the harms that are visited on the multitude of creatures with whom we live.

Scholarship in Animal Studies and adjacent fields repeatedly points out the fact that in the expansion of industrialization and global capitalism the other-than-human being is always an object, always denied its own subjectivity. In the case of the roadkilled being, it is clear then that there is a double objectification: first in the invisibility of the living individual, but again in the invisibilizing of the dead. Through the work of Lou Florence, Near Dwellers as Roadkill attempts to open up space for examining the aesthetics and politics of these fatal encounters.

[1] Desmond, Jane C., Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life. University of Chicago Press. 2016. P. 143
[2] ibid., page 141.