Aleisa Miksad

This work is part of Curatorial+Co.'s 2026 group exhibition, 'The Beast In Me'.

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.

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. The beast and the artist emerge from the same ungovernable place, each carrying the dread of what they might reveal; to create from this place is to set the animal loose.

Says Aleisa Miksad of this work, "Covered in fur-like, hair-covered spikes, this anthropomorphic vessel draws on the narrative of 'Hairy Mary,' in which hair emerges as a form of protection in response to exposure. The work reconsiders hair as a symbol that, within androcentric myths, has often been used to cast women as unruly or other, reframing it instead as a marker of resilience and transformation."