'Animal Crossdressing, Uninvited Collaborations with Nature, and One Small Act of Endurance'
Through Jan. 3, Catherine Clark Gallery

NINA KATCHADOURIAN DOESN'T exactly molest the animals in her art; she just disturbs them a little. The works featured in "Animal Crossdressing, Uninvited Collaborations with Nature, and One Small Act of Endurance" are a continuation of her 1998 "Mended Spiderweb" series, in which she added red threads to spiderwebs and was promptly thwarted by the spiders, who scurried around restoring their webs as fast as she could alter them. This time, Katchadourian makes two natural enemies – a snake and a rat – dress up as each other. The Animal Crossdressing video shows her coaxing their wriggling, struggling bodies into sewn costumes, and a series of photos titled Carla and a Friend shows the two once again undressed, playing and relaxing together in seemingly unlikely harmony. "A wolf in sheep's clothing"; "fighting like cats and dogs"; where do the hackneyed phrases end and the truth about animal behavior begin? Katchadourian only barely begins to answer the question. Instead she focuses on articulating it in fancifully contradictory terms, utilizing both digital technology and old-fashioned needle and thread. The costumes aren't designed to actually fool the animals – or us – into mistaking them for something else, nor does she try to convince us the animals were quiescent, malleable coconspirators in her project. Again and again she foists her whims on her subjects, only to demonstrate, as she did with the spiderwebs, that any sophisticated meaning we might perceive in their responses is a product of our own imaginations. Her photograph titled QUIT USING US says it most succinctly: a dozen or so caterpillars, arranged into the words of the title, appear to be breaking apart into illegibility before our eyes. It perfectly evokes the artist's urge to influence nature and her self-consciously ironic urge to read resistance into nature's response. Tues.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., 49 Geary, second floor, S.F. (415) 399-1439. (Lindsey Westbrook)