They live among us—elegant creatures, dangerous creatures, drooling creatures. Through photographs, collected objects, textiles, and installation, Emily O’Leary and Bucky Miller provide a rich space to contemplate the otherness of dogs. Leaving dog clichés aside, both artists frame the dog as a singular figure in the human imaginary and a physical, material being with its own agendas and its own consciousness.
Emily O’Leary received her BFA in Sculpture from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. Like some sort of slow, slow drawing, her samplers (pieces of needlework made with a variety of stitches) depict scenarios that are modestly strange, a catalog of circumstances just at the edge of recognition or familiarity. She has an upcoming solo exhibition of at Women and Their Work Gallery in Austin, Texas in the Summer of 2020. She has two sister dogs named Cobalt and Dash.
Bucky Miller is an internationally-exhibited artist from Phoenix, AZ. He earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and studied in the Royal College of Art Program in Sculpture. His first self-published book was selected as one of photo-eye’s best of 2016, and he is a 2018 recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship. He is currently the Director of Education at the Houston Center for Photography. He has no dogs.
Organized by Jessi DiTillio, 2017–18 Visual Arts Center Curatorial Fellow