Tales from an Imaginary Menagerie explores current directions in contemporary art in which artists have created imaginary hybrid animals or mined the subject of animals in an anthropomorphic territory usually reserved for publications for children. These directions may revisit the wide realm of imagination identified with 19th century cabinets of wonder, reflect the artist’s political strategies for statements on science or gender, or be a mechanism for compelling narratives or delving into investigations of the inner psyche. The blurring of the boundaries between human and animal manifests our culture’s projection of human attributes in our companion creatures and adoption of animal attributes in human activities, ranging from athletic contest to claiming sexual identity.

Tales from an Imaginary Menagerie features drawings, sculpture, photography, tapestry, and video by Randy Bolton, Ria Brodell, John Casey, Adam Chapman, Timothy Cummings, Walton Ford, Justin Gibbens, Scott Greene, Julie Heffernan, Laurie Hogin, Anthony Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth, Misako Inaoka, Nina Katchadourian, Margot Quan Knight, Philip Knoll, Walter Robinson, John Slepian, Deth P. Sun, Kevin E. Taylor, Masami Teraoka, Donald Roller Wilson, and Yuka Yamaguchi. In collaboration with the exhibition Natural Blunders at the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara University [http://www.scu.edu/de Saisset], Tales from an Imaginary Menagerie marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.