Re: Deer Head Debacle

by Bill Davenport June 22, 2008

RE: Deer Head Debacle
ICON: trophy deer head
SUBGENRE: ornate
HOOK: masculine/feminine

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Jennifer Khoshbin
, San Antonio, 2008


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Elaine Bradford
, Sweatered Elk, 2004

 

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Ethan Moore, 2008

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Nancy Josephson

 

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Rachel Denny
, Portland, Oregon

 

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Marc Swanson

 

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Alex Da Corte
, Philadelphia, 2007

 

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What more can I say?

5 comments

5 comments

tobrienwriter June 23, 2008 - 10:33

you forgot Eric Swenson!
I’ve been decrying the proliferation of fuckin deer head/glitter/knitting (mix match merge) art for years – thanks for the aggravating if instructive visual compendium. Bill, can you do skull and mushroom ones next?

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Richard Dalkins June 24, 2008 - 10:56

Cute lil birds like wrens and sparrows. Ken should get a pass. He’s been doing those collages for years now. I wonder if the sudden proliferation of like objects is due to the over saturation saturation of like imagery constantly churned out by the trade publications and websites like this one. A kind of subliminal tag that gets into artists minds and causes them to make “deer head” art. Actually I would like to hear more on the subject. Is this ramped copy-cating on a regional scale or has the deer head become the new rectangle/square canvas and the rest of us just haven’t caught on yet? What’s next? Dumpsters?

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pmaury June 24, 2008 - 18:11

I collaborated with Jennifer Khoshbin on the recent show at 1906 Gallery in San Antonio. No one “ripped off” Ethan Moore’s special deer head aesthetic, I can assure you of that. We had neither seen nor heard of Moore’s work until he announced himself by complaining of idea theft. It’s kind of silly, as everyone realizes, since this design move has been so widely circulated over the past five years or so. It’s in the public domain, so to speak, trite really. The New York Times did an article on it, fronting a photo of deer heads in a trash can. Much more interesting and inexplicable is this: the show at 1906 Gallery includes one single sollitary deer head. This one deer head appears amidst twenty-two other objects, including drawings on paper, short original texts, carved books, and a live performance piece featuring a typist wearing a chicken mask. The show was not about deer heads. It was about animals, distorted popular folk tales, and the strange human place between them. I do not understand how this fixation on the deer head arose, but in any case our show at 1906 Gallery has nothing to do with the “deer head debacle.”

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kuoskies June 26, 2008 - 13:46

Adelaide Paul. Not that I’m totally into taking people’s work out of context.

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