Are you my mother? 2010
About the work:
Are you my Mother? Begs the question does the young Zebra even understand it is a Zebra, this work implies a major disruption in the
animal body and its understanding of self. The absence of the Zebra bodies and the arrangement of the heads on the wall take the family
group from a complex living interactive organism and reduce it to linear decoration. Simon Gregg, curator of the Gippsland Regional
Gallery wrote this about Are you my Mother? in the gallery catalogue notes for the Animal Kingdom Exhibition, 28th July -23 September, 2012,
‘ The sceptre of sentimentality is held firmly at bay by the artists dark humour, as we are directly affronted by the senselessness of collecting
animal trophy heads. – Are you my mother? will send shockwaves through all others who come into contact with it. Pitching game hunting through
the eyes of the animal is nothing new, but McRae retells the narrative with a stark real –world sobriety’.
Did you know?
The culling of older individuals in mammal communities can lead to disruptions in leadership and role models for the younger animals.
In the case of Elephants for example, ‘Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today's elephant populations are suffering from
a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted
the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which
established elephant herds are governed, that what we
are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of
elephant culture.’
In 2006, the New York Times ran an article called ‘Elephant Crack-up’ here is the link… http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&_rmoc.semityn.levart
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