In CatFight, the cast replica skeletons of two adult female saber-toothed tigers are choreographed and strung up as if engaged in battle, suspended from the ceiling with thick, plastic monofilament lines. The bones were cast from ancient remains recovered from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, and silver leaf was added to accentuate their teeth and claws. CatFight was originally conceived during E.V. Day’s residence at Artpace, the Linda Pace Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, and was partly inspired by the infamous TV catfights of shows such as “Falcon Crest” and “Dallas.” 

Colloquially, a catfight is a fight between women, an association the piece mines to deliver this playful and potent commentary on gender stereotypes and the place of female-on-female drama in our culture. Day’s feuding felines reflect the animal kingdom’s primal act of “fight” - a power struggle usually over territory or to establish dominance - but add an element of ambiguity, the potential for violence to collapse into comedy, play or dance. CatFight, like watching a girl-fight, makes us confront our repressed urges and tendencies toward competition, voyeurism, savagery, and sexual supremacy, while also, via its two mirrored halves, offering a canny reflection on the feminist psychoanalytic subject. 

The viewer is implicated in CatFight’s space of spectacular propulsive energy, which spills out via dancing patterns of shadows onto the walls and floor. CatFight’s intense moment of primordial drama is compressed but only partially contained by the space of the gallery, the saber-toothed tiger not being domestic to the environment of the 21st century exhibition venue. However, CatFight also creates a quieter, more internal space and metaphor, presenting the internal and external halves of the self in anxious opposition, fighting with each other in the mind; in so doing, CatFight offers a representation of the feminine space of creation as well as an entry into the art-historical genre “portrait of the artist and her mother”.

“Characteristic of Day’s sculptural process, the skeletons are harnessed and suspended in midair by reflective monofilaments that slice through space, tension and gravity, drawing their monumental forms into taut lines of energy. The visceral pause in the stop-action battle heightens and isolates the drama as each combatant strains, paradoxically, toward and against their own obliteration.”

@evdayartist  www.evdaystudio.com                        -Jane Ursula Harris, June 2014