Sympathetic Hunting Magic:
Sculpture by Niall Donaghy
and Shelly Rahme 

3 September - 30 October, 2011

In most forms of formal art education students are introduced to Paleolithic cave paintings as part of their studies. The review of the historical significance of these works often references an anthropological theory that Paleolithic peoples believed in and practiced forms of magic, in particular, "sympathetic hunting magic," which posits that images of animal art painted on walls were inended to compel the world to magically improve the hunt.

The theory is often disputed by contemporary scholars and it is argued that perhaps the opposite is true; that these paintings expressed an understandinging that the world cannot be compelled into action. It is in this context that recent work by sculptors Niall Donaghy and Shelly Rahme can be viewed. Donaghy's sculpture Superfortress (pictured above), a scale version of the WWII B-29 bomber that hunted down and laid atomic waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cannot of itself serve to avert nuclear destruction. Shelley Rahme's wild and deadly River comprised of a flow of hundreds of kitchen knives aligned so as to swirl through and about a rock-strewn path cannot soften or reduce the lethality of a turbulent flow of water. 

These sculptures do however remind us of the yearning present in our experience of the world that can only be called consistent with a want for magic. Curated by Gil McElroy.