PONTIC DOGS

2017 | 1080p HD Video | Stereo Sound | West Virginia, Virginia | Camera Trap Footage | English | TRT Variable

A live-streamed video art piece from camera traps, reimagining Castor canadensis, canals, dykes, dams, queers, emasculated maleness, and non-human built environments.

Beavers were hunted in the Medieval era for their testicles and anal glands, which were said to contain an important medicinal balm (castoreum). Aesop claimed that a beaver, if confronted by a hunter, will bite off its own testicles and throw them aside in order to save itself. Medieval manuscripts illustrate the beaver as a sexually endowed, ferocious dog. This imagery can be traced back to ancient Persia, where beavers are  سگ آبی  (Persian - sag ī ābīg). Literally, "water dog". The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates claimed that the best castoreum came from Pontus, and therefore called beavers Pontic Dogs.

Beavers become a living surrogate for the artist’s meditation on queer embodiment, myth, and contradiction. The Pontic Dogs carve highways through swampy freshwater murk, move easily within dark mudscapes, gnaw through the hardest of physiological scenarios, live in a soup of possibility. Within their mythos these animals have come to reference industry and persistence, but they are historically signifiers for emasculated maleness and, more commonly, female genitals.