Dana Sherwood

Dana Sherwood is an American artist whose diverse practice explores the relationship between humans and the natural world in order to understand culture and behavior in a changing environment.  In her work, nature, often in the form of non-human animals, plays a complex role as both subject and collaborator, asserting its presence and subverting the artists’ perceived control. Sherwood relies upon her own style of magical-realism to portray contact between human and non-human animals as a tool to understand culture and behavior and more importantly to recognize the interconnectedness of our ecosystem. Her sculptures, videos, and paintings depict ritualized feedings created for animals who live on the frontiers of human civilization such as raccoons, possums, and foxes as well as our for our close companion species like horses and dogs.  The animals assert their presence and desires as the work reflects on the Anthropocene and our place in the natural world. The extended culinary conversation results in a body of work that is paradoxically enchanted, supernatural and systematic at the same time.