One of Boudreau's spray painted works
While we were sad that Michael Alm moved his fur-wearing mannequins out of Ghost Gallery last week, gallery owner Laurie Kearney didn’t think twice about launching another exhibit following the same animal-like theme. During tonight’s Blitz Capitol Hill Arts Walk, check out Greg Boudreau’s “Big Game Hunters” installation that includes fourteen spray painted pictures of slain South African wildlife and their grinning capturers.
Boudreau references photographs he found from private hunting expeditions five years ago and creates hand cut stencils imitating the images. Laying them onto salvaged wood, he spray paints each stenciled shape until the paint is thick enough so that the wood grain doesn’t show through. The end result looks a little like a paint by numbers creation.
Boudreau illustrates the giant beasts as sleeping rather than shot, their eyes half shut against the safari’s hot sun. The hippo is caught with its mouth gaping open as if it had taken its final yawn before meeting a bullet, while the lion rests peacefully in the brush as his Robert Redford look-alike smiles from behind. Even the young woman holding the impala’s antlers looks overjoyed sitting next to her blurry eyed prize. What could have been a morbid demonstration has been twisted into a display of majestic animals who have simply lost the battle against another predator.
On display through March 5.
Photo courtesy of Ghost Gallery
- Visual Art
