THE SUBLIME IS MEOW

An exhibition of artist-made cat toys

Adam Farcus – Ally Messer – Amy Shindo – Ayla Shadya Alsebai

Brandon Alvendia – Brian Taylor – Carmel Dor – Charlotte G. Chin Greene

Cindy Stockton Moore – Cobi Moules – Damian Hellmuth – David Moré

Elliot Engles – Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson – Heather Mekkelson

Heather Swenson – Helen Zuckerman – Jacob Lunderby – Jay Icasiano

Jill Ian Donohue – Jose Villalobos – Katie Low – Libby Rosa – M.B.B.

Maddie Rodriguez – Maria Hyun Stracke – Marilla Cubberley

Matthew Witmer – Maya Townsend – Michael Saunders

Michelle Anne Harris – Miriam Angeles Arrey – Misha Wyllie

Noah Grossman – Ollie Goss – Philip von Zweck – PHL Dye Club

Pol Morton – Sarah McEneaney – Shawn Beeks – Soso Capaldi

October 26 – November 30, 2024
Opening Reception 5-9pm October 26, 2024

“The avant-garde task is to undo spiritual assumptions regarding time. The sense of The Sublime is the name of the dismantling.”
-Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1984

Calling all miserable, childless cat lovers and their world-destroying comrades! The future is Feline and it is right fucking MEOW! Big Ramp is pleased to announce our invitational exhibition of artist-made cat toys with contributions by artists from around the country engaged in spectacle, serious play, concrete comedy, commodity fetishism, slacktivism, low-effort relational antagonism, high-effort readymades, detournement, domestic poetics, institutional cat-tique, post-internet cat-sthetics, spatial paw-etry, or capitalist purr-realism. Considerations of The Sublime follow a lineage (going back at least to the 17th century) of artists and philosophers continually reframing the illusive concept in contrast to The Beautiful. Beauty is pleasing, while the sensory experience of sublimity links pleasure to its dangerous opposite: pleasure to pain, joy to anxiety, awe to fear, creation to destruction. A flower can be Beautiful, but standing at a cliff’s edge overlooking a canyon is always Sublime. For Sir Edmund Burke it’s the encounters with incomprehensible enormity. For American painter Barnett Newman it’s the temporal experience of things happening, a feeling of NOW that reveals or dismantles consciousness. For Lyotard it can even be traced through Capitalism itself, whenever the “Is it happening?” mingles with the “Will it stop happening?” And maybe then we are left with “Will it ever
happen again?”

In typical election year fashion we’ve had many “Is this happening?” moments. As we approach November the wild claims barfed out by pundits and politicians seem to accelerate into a never-ending parade of brutal worm-brained absurdity. There’s been a suggestion that a “cat-lady” – whose feline friends serve as a disturbing substitute for a human child – is destroying America through sheer selfishness. She’s miserable, yet maternally fulfilled by cat-love, thus threatening the neoliberal promises of economic stability. We must have MORE human bodies to grind inside the invisible teeth of capitalism! But if she wins, our perfect union will be shredded like the naked legs of a sexy couch under the claws of a cute kitten.

Can one love a pet so much that they inadvertently become ANTIFA? Or perhaps one becomes radicalized more easily when considering a migrant “Eating the Pets!” We as a voting public must decide to operate from xenophobic fear or from toxoplasmodic joy. Yeah, we’re all burnt out from the labor of untangling these political philosophies. And some of us are visual learners. Here, a graph for your consideration:

Politicians have targeted our whiskered friends and we simply can not oblige such transgressions any longer. And if there’s one thing we can learn from a cat it’s how to not tolerate a single ounce of bullshit. So in the last weeks of this battle as we climb the walls, reach for the eject button, and fumble around in a panic hoping to put our support towards someone who will stop these wars, stop this genocide, end this violence, looking for a release valve, we call our cat’s name in the darkness of our uncertainty begging them to “Come get some pettttzzzzz!” But they don’t come…because they don’t want to and you haven’t earned it yet.

So instead we offer a distraction that promises to be both Avant Garde and carnivalesque, hoping to temporarily calm the uncertain imperilment of this election year. Our search for that emotional release valve takes us to Big Ramp where 40 artists take up the task of making art objects for cats, in ecstatic creation, subversive opposition, or in boredom. Using found and ready-made materials, these artists find themselves in these last anxious hours, considering what tactile things and animal-like movements can fulfill that psychic lock, that physiological need to play, to hunt, to attack, but always to dominate our domestic lives while perched sleepily upon our windowsills. Renouncing the large and grandiose, we seek the sublime in the small and mundane: a piece of string, a feather, or scrap of plastic become fascinating and timeless.

A shoelace is being tied. A glass of water sits uncomfortably close to the edge of a table. A newly upholstered couch…exists. These are temporal ecstasies surely approaching The Sublime. A cat after all, is a living thing composed of dangerous opposites, and so in this spirit we now declare THE SUBLIME IS MEOW! As we earnestly, sarcastically, or conceptually make the effort to communicate the complicated intimacy of our Furball love and the joy of play.