With life-like presence, the animals in the work of Mary Anne Barkhouse offer an enchanted encounter with the natural world. She invites us to approach beavers, badgers, coyotes and wolves set in their own tableaux, a reminder that we are entering into their space. There is a sense of one’s walking up to an event, a dramatic scene between species or, as with her installation work Sovereign in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, perhaps we are the event. The fox in repose is positioned in observation of us. The vignettes are whimsical, even wily, yet to dig deeper is to understand how Barkhouse’s practice is the creation of counter-narratives.

Read full article on National Gallery of Canada Magazine.