Artists Doug LaFortune and Jesse Garbe focus our attention on the visual representation of animals, and what this tells us about the legacy of differing cultural attitudes to the more-than-human world, including animal encounters within urban environments.

Doug LaFortunes’ artwork draws together the visual iconography and cultural traditions of Coast Salish art with a deeply personal vision. His artworks often reference animals, not simply as symbols, but as means for communicating his daily feelings and experiences, such as in an ongoing series of drawings, titled Wexes, that he shares on social media every morning. LaFortune’s approach to the animal world opens up opportunities for us to witness how animals are understood as integral to an understanding of place, rather than treated as objects to be looked at and objectified. Instead, LaFortune’s imagery evokes a deep sense of respect and love for the many critters that he treats as continuous with his own life experiences and emotions.

​Jesse Garbe’s artwork interrogates ‘nature painting’ through a critique of the Natural History Museum, and its systems of display, such as the diorama, that, he argues, have shaped the pictorial conventions of Western European and early North American painting. His paintings reference Western painting, and popular, consumer culture, such as the cartoon figures of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, and by using the tools of humour, metaphor and irony, he sets out to denature the very construct of “natural history” within Western imaginaries. His work demonstrates how social and cultural assumptions mold and shape understandings of “what nature looks like,” and in turn, his work helps us to think through how representations of animals in particular, “contain meanings that assist in the maintenance and reproduction of a political and ideological positioning.”