LONDON.- Hot Dogs and Problem Pets is Freya Pocklington’s second solo exhibition with Breese Little following Wolves Find Dogs Delicious (2013). Pocklington’s caricatured cast of pets and their owners are presented as self-conscious vignettes of human-animal interactions. Domestic norms are sunk for new environments that often empower pets as animals rather than controlled lapdogs. Both species are presented in awkward portraits, with uncanny likeness to one another, enacting scenes patched together from ever-popular tabloid and social media folklore. Chinese whispers are shown to supersede traditional story telling with the speed of online myth making, producing modern fables to fantastical or confusing effect.

Pocklington studies the social role of pets and the compulsion to humanise wild animals. She critiques the suppression of natural instincts by revealing the unnatural consequences of interfering with evolution. Ethical boundaries are raised through the inversion of conditioned roles, with humans revealing animalistic tendencies when left unchecked. The recurrent hot dog is positioned as the ultimate unnatural product, processed out of recognition and perversely anthropomorphised to whet the appetite. Animal and nature encyclopedias provide contrastingly naturalistic content, framing Pocklington’s scenes with flora and fauna against bucolic mountain scenery.

As Douglas Pérez Castro’s narrative methods in The Fifth World, running concurrently in the ground floor gallery, Pocklington uses humour in her social critique. The resulting inversion of natural roles has a surreal absurdity, implicating human responsibility for the deranged state of manipulated animals and their humans.

Freya Pocklington (b. 1984, UK) lives and works in London. Pocklington graduated from Edinburgh College of Art (BA Fine Art) in 2006 and Wimbledon College of Art (MA Drawing) in 2009. Selected exhibitions and residencies include West Dean College residency, West Sussex (2014), Drawing Live, National Open Art Competition, Somerset House, London (2014), ALL TOGETHER NOW!, BREESE LITTLE, London (2014), Library of Lost Books, Oxford Brookes University (2014), Old tin cutlery before the invention of the fork, BREESE LITTLE, London (2014), The Library of Lost Books, Birmingham City Library (2013), Mirror of The Open Road, Wilding Festival, St Georges, London (2013), Wolves Find Dogs Delicious (solo) (2013), BREESE LITTLE, London, Art Below for Frieze, Regents Park Underground Station, London (2012), Maggs beneath the covers, Maggs Bros, Longon (2012), Summer Exhibition, The Florence Trust, London (2011). Pocklington’s work is featured in the collections of The British Museum, Edinburgh College of Art, The Royal Scottish Academy, Chichester Cathedral and The Victoria and Albert Museum.