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Saturday, July 19, 2003

By Terry Young

"Fellowship 2003," the fourth annual fellowship award exhibition sponsored by Silver Eye Center for Photography, showcases the works of Sue Stepusin, the $3,000 fellowship winner, in addition to 10 honorable mention artists.

Fellowship 2003 was juried by Laura Hoptman, curator of contemporary art, Carnegie Museum of Art. Interestingly, Hoptman, whose current workload of assembling the next Carnegie International most likely has her jetting across continents to visit art luminaries far and wide, has chosen Stepusin of Venetia in rural Washington County as this year's winner. More than 136 applicants from across the country were considered.

Stepusin exhibits 18 black-and-white prints, all printed on 16-by-20-inch paper, matted accordingly. The documentary-style images focus on the cats, dogs, horses, squirrels and ducklings, ordinary to Stepusin's world. Human presence is detected either in images of people with their pets, or in the sense that all these animals are domesticated.

About half of the images artfully record the bittersweet day-to-day routine of a veterinarian's office. It's no coincidence that Stepusin's husband is a veterinarian. Her own animal expertise includes more than 30 years of experience training horses and riders for national-level competitions. In addition, she has a master's degree in English literature, from the University of Pittsburgh.

Stepusin offers an honest look at the animals in her immediate surrounds, gazing at once with both sympathy and nonchalance at her subjects. Immediately, the everyday imagery of domesticated animals together with a human presence -- either in the image or in the photographer's act -- calls into discussion the loaded discussion of human-animal interaction, and the historical representation of this phenomenon.

Some 30,000 years ago humans began to decorate cave walls with images of animals -- among them horses -- in surprisingly aesthetic presentations. Roman mosaics reveal horses, dogs and sea creatures. Jacques-Louis David envisioned a triumphant Napoleon riding a thunderous steed in 1801. Stepusin is part of this continuum as she depicts animals from her everyday world. Her horses look back at the camera's lens, without an implied narrative.

Animals inspire mythmaking by humans and have been assigned social, religious and political significance. Egyptian deities were often part animal, part human. Jaguars and serpents decorate Mayan temples. Recent Fourth of July celebrations saw more than one bald eagle. Images of dinosaurs decorate bedsheets. The recent Disney animated feature "Finding Nemo" personifies fish in an "Odyssey"-like epic of human emotion. Doves of peace, mad cow disease, the frog prince, Japanese origami birds, sacred cows, John Deere tractors, the dog days of summer -- human perceptions and representations of animals abound.

Stepusin demonstrates that the visual animal imagery we create is merely a gateway to a symbolic, instinctual relationship to both animals and how we see ourselves.

Her intent is clearly not to offer a sweeping overview of the human-animal cultural phenomenon. Her photographs allude to this loaded meta-narrative only because of the honesty through which she focuses her lens and captures a moment. Her individual relationship to the animals she surrounds herself is not contrived. Through her story we can relate our own.

In addition to raising questions about the varied representations of animals in human cultures, Stepusin opens a window into a culture that is an hour or two outside of most cities. One in which the number of people and streets diminish as the number of animals and trees grows.

Terry Young is a freelance writer and artist who lives in Pittsburgh.