Art Hound

Highlights from Naoe Suzuki’s show Mi Tigre, My Lover which opens this Saturday at Open Source Gallery. I get emotional when I see animals (even ones on paper) mistreated, but I swallowed my discomfort to appreciate the complicated, symbiotic relationship Suzuki depicts between trainer and tiger.

This series is inspired by a life of Mabel Stark, a renowned female tiger trainer for circus in the early 1900s. Mabel survived many severe mauling by her tigers but kept going back to the tiger cage. I was thinking about “being captive” and their love/power relationship. Tigers were the ones kept in the cage and obvious captives, but I thought Mabel was also a captive by her tigers. Her life was consumed by her love and obsession for tigers.  – Naoe Suzuki via ArtSake

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In Mi Tigre, My Lover, there’s a complex play of love and power between a woman and her tiger. I hope people feel some sort of tension in the space between a woman and her tiger—obsession, control, submission, passion, desire, whatever that is.  – Naoe Suzuki via ArtSake

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