Animal Planet

Ben Woodward, <i>Always at Home</i>, 40 inches by

36 inches, gouache on wood.

Ben Woodward, Always at Home, 40 inches by 36 inches, gouache on wood.

Ben Woodward's zoological take on reality invades Spector Gallery.

by Susan Hagen

But the Earth is Already in Space: New Paintings by Ben WoodwardThrough Oct. 4, Spector Gallery, 510 Bainbridge St., 215-238-0840

Ben Woodward, a 28-year-old Philadelphia artist with a rising star, has put together a show at Spector that includes new gouache paintings on wood, as well as some of the silkscreen prints from the past two years that helped to establish his reputation. Woodward’s oeuvre is based on pithy observations of animals at the Philadelphia Zoo that are combined, cartoon-style, with peculiarities garnered from the emotional and social lives of the human species. For several years in his Space 1026 studio, he has made silkscreen prints from this appealing but darkly ironic imagery, which have become a familiar part of the Philadelphia urban landscape. Woodward began wheat-pasting his prints showing misshapen, but infinitely loveable, “lost” animals around the city in 1999 (as “street art” adroitly posing as socially sanctioned public pleas for lost pets) and new prints still can be seen from time to time.

The five multicolor prints on display were produced in an unsigned edition for outdoor wheat-pasting and a signed edition for indoor use. Each 36 by 36-inch print captures a crisply rendered hybrid creature or two, like a natural history print. For example, Begrudgingly De-evolving shows a large, bloated quadruped with human arms and legs in profile, and a face with a sour expression. But as if to symbolize its negative state of mind and loneliness, a translucent mauve-brown cloud covers its orange-ish body and a large expanse of bare paper surrounds it. Psychological themes continue in Taking Care of Other People's Problems, which shows a friendly but rather bored ape holding an expiring bird in his enormous hands, and Boo Boo, a cautionary fable of a haughty man-animal with a dazzlingly beautiful pelt of orange-gold fur looking at his soiled foot after stepping in a pile of steaming shit.

In his gouache paintings on wood panels, all made in 2002, Woodward has continued to explore the disorienting cuteness of animals and psychological themes. When the Lights Go Out, 32 by 36 inches, exposes two sleepy, slightly depressed guinea pigs with brown humanoid noses in their tiny underground pad. What's the nature of their relationship? What inertia keeps them in their respective places? And how on earth did they get that bare electric bulb into their little lair? These unanswered questions draw us into the work and create a framework for narrative. Cloud Punchers, 41 by 36 inches, also presents an uneasy relationship between two characters in a cartoon landscape. A beefy, upright calico cat with human features punches at a hefty gray cat holding a cloud in front of itself for protection which, mysteriously, transforms its dull fur into lush rainbow hues.

Cloud Punchers, 41 inches by 36 inches, gouache on wood.

Perhaps inspired by his training as a filmmaker at Rhode Island School of Design, Woodward has taken the narrative impulse a step further in several paintings. In the evocative Always at Home, 40 by 36 inches, a keenly observed tortoise stands immobilized on a lawn of manicured, emerald-green grass. Meanwhile, the carapace of the animal is completely covered with a foamy substance and teems with oversized earthworms. Tactile and richly colorful (fleshy pink and brown, ochre, olive green and magenta), the worms create a delightful frisson -- layered with repulsion. Cloudy Day, 22 by 27 inches, also features worms in an unlikely setting. Here they're presented in an elaborate allegorical scene on a cracked sidewalk involving three cats with humanoid faces, a mask and a cloudlike balloon of wriggling worms. These pieces are more detailed and technically refined, and the strangeness of their stories and symbols takes us deep into a post-9/11 world of fear, aggression and anxiety.

The increasingly complex narratives in Ben Woodward's highly original prints and paintings give us a new look at the "same old earth, already in space." Which is to say, this imaginative (and bizarre) approach is in keeping with the true (bizarre) nature of reality. The sharp pungency of Woodward's message is not diminished by the sweetness of his characters; in fact, it is beautifully, and diabolically, heightened by it.