As children, we learn about the harsh reality about life; the frailties of human conditions; and views on moral values through stories that dampens brutality. Our books present us fabulous fables from Aesop to George Orwell and our television occupy us with adventures of animated mouse, ducks and dogs. The treachery of the truth is replaced with delight as we learn the importance of hard work and thinking ahead from anthropomorphic ants cautioning a slacker grasshopper. And the solace we find from Mickey Mouse’ smile or Winnie the Pooh’s hug will continue to shelter us until we are ready to face the discord of adulthood. Bree Jonson’s New Dogs; Old Vices illustrates the potency of fables and the use of animals to create impact without trauma as she furthers her investigation on human life in her unique verisimilar artistic gesture.

In New Dogs; Old Vices, Jonson acquaints us with canines in motion and in their seized perpetual motion, they taunt us with questions that can and will never be answered. The scenes from Jonson’s paintings trigger familiar yet bizarre semblance to our own life experiences. One easily recognizes the same exact moment when a dog lies down on the ground, belly up and in crazy leg position. In Jonson’s hands, the recognizable scene is imbued with the oddity of seashore that cracks open the banality of the moment and leaves us hanging, perplexed with inquiries. Her choice to focus on dogs as subject matter, rather than having multiple exotic creatures, amplifies our acquaintanceship to each picture and directs us to the domesticity of their acts. In each scene that portrays the naturalistic tendencies of dogs lies the obscurity of the entire moment being incorporated within outlandish terrains.

In The Undoing of Limbs, a dog drags another dog away from the pile. In it, we witness a daring attempt to save another being, at the same time the heft and complexity of the narrative involves the gnashing of the fangs that grabs a limb. The simplicity of dogging around and getting caught in a juncture of entanglement becomes an instant hysteria; the scene becomes a violent playground. The farcical site of pile of different breed of dogs turns tragic in The Body of the Man You Were. The amicable features of furry animals are plastered with expressions of discontent and nonchalant acceptance of their fate – immobility and restraint for undetermined duration.

In New Dogs; Old Vices, Jonson devices a non-linear narrative, a glimpse into stories with no beginning and no end. Examining through her works transmits a certain affinity to her characters. Their animalistic acts seem to transcend to our own humanistic tendencies. From her piece, What Grows in what Cracks – where a wall shrouds the entirety of a sexual act perpetuated by two dogs, denying us of any further clues of what lies behind the defiled space, to Meat Kinetics – where apparent demise seemed plausible in the act of playful dogs jumping off the cliff, the basic human drives of pleasure and survival are mirrored back to the viewer.

The distinctions between humans and animals are blurred as the work efficiently fleshes out primal instincts universal to both – the need to survive without ever knowing ‘why.’ The Bloom is Gone (And we are the Fruit) symbolically embodies man’s social condition since time immemorial, of how we chase each other around without any logical basis or until we forget the reason why we do it. It is a basic depiction of human dynamics within a community – the existence of the predator and the prey; the one who is feared and the timid that gets chased around.

In every story ever told or written, a sympathetic audience knows that in the end, she or he reaps the benefit to reflect and contemplate, no matter how dreadful the last act may be.

The Sky is Empty is a nod to painter Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.’ Friedrich’s wanderer is replaced by Jonson’s wounded dog, with its back toward the viewer, it turns its gaze into the hazy sea of fog. With evidence of fresh flesh scrapes from recent skirmish, it halts at the edge of a cliff approximating a man mesmerized by the sight of the haze, gasping in wonder and trying to pierce through the unknown. Bree Jonson’s meandering imagination into the natural state of dogs amidst perverse settings draws a close similarity to our own domestic life. Perhaps the uncanny similarities between dogs and men in her paintings were not meant to just create symbolic gestures; rather they intend to ask why we keep acting like animals – like savages restrained by civilization.

essay by Michael John Cruz (Lecruz)