Valegro
November 3 - December 2, 2016
Exhibition Text Documentation
 
 
 

Valegro
Benjamin Ashlock
Beatriz Balanta & Mary Walling Blackburn
John Hiltunen
Sarah McMenimen
John Russell
Jess Smith

Curated by Jackie Im

November 3 - December 2, 2016

Slide Space 123
Mills College
5000 MacArthur Boulevard
Oakland, CA 94612


Later that year, [Charlotte] Dujardin devised a new freestyle for Valegro. She made the floor plan as difficult as she could imagine, opening with a half-pass in trot that moved into a half-pass in passage, followed by a combined piaffe and a pirouette and straight into another phase of passage. She rode an extended canter into a douple pirouette, and set the test to music from "How the Train Your Dragon." Dujardin and Valegro performed the routine for the first time at the Olympia horse show, in London, that December. Together, they broke the last of Tortilas's world records. "I literally did the final bit with tears rolling down my face, because he is the sort of horse that gives you everything," Dujardin said. "He gives you everything, and I can feel the partnership and the connection. He is, like, with me."

                                            - Sam Knight, "The Duo That Dominates Dressage"

What are the bonds that exist between man and animal; the closeness and kinship that exist across species - between a human and a pet, animals worked with in labor and sport? In The Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway speaks of the relationships between man and animal as a relationship of significant otherness: "They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution." Valegro explores these kinships and how humans and animals live with and use each other, how we cope with the world together at the intersection of empathy and projection.