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.

Freud defined the id as a "cauldron full of seething excitations," filled with energy that has no organisation, no collective will, only the drive toward satisfaction. It is the most primal and ungovernable part of us. The exhibition does not attempt to resolve the tension between the human and the animal, the ego and the id, the outward self and the seething excitations beneath it. Rather, it sits in the limitrophe, making it visible, and in doing so, returns us to what has been expelled, suppressed, debased—the beast in us.

Exhibiting 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.