Of all the internal mechanisms that drive us, perhaps the most primordial is the beast. We expel the animal, the bodily, the base in favour of the intellect, yet it is the beast that holds what is most irreducibly human—impulses and desires that precede thought: love, rage, care, protection, connection. The very thing we suppress is also the thing that touches what is most vital.

Nothing is only what we have reduced it to—look again. The beast is not just a beast. Abjection is not simply about disgust, but about the complexity of what we suppress. Rather than revealing which parts of ourselves are more animal, The Beast in Me considers which parts of ourselves we have expelled in order to become more human. What makes these works transgressive is not their subject matter but how they collapse the border between human and animal, self and body, civility and instinct.

Featured artists:

Aleisa Miksad
Ana Young
Benjamin Akuila
Brad Gunn
Bruce Reynolds
Chelsea Lehmann
Deborah Kelly
Ivy Riddle
Jillian Nalty
Liss Finney
Martina Clarke
Omi McCurdie
Sadhbha Cockburn
Saskia Vander
Samuel Chan
Sophia Olivieri

Featured image: Deborah Kelly, Beastliness (Still), 2011.