Animals' place in nature at UC Riverside's Sweeney Art Gallery

Man and beast, the connection was made physical by Charles Darwin in his theory of evolution in the mid-19th century. Since then zoologists and wildlife documentaries have further drawn our relationship to animals, and a slew of artists have been pondering the same; an exhibition at UC Riverside's Sweeney Art Gallery, "Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art" (through Nov. 28), has gathered provocative projects.

"In the past, art dealing with animals usually addressed issues of representation," says Tyler Stallings, gallery director. "I wanted to expand beyond that." And this being the bicentennial of Darwin's birth made it seemed especially timely for such a show.

Stallings invited Rachel Mayeri, an associate professor of media studies at Harvey Mudd College who is well known for her interest in "soft science" and is an artist, to help co-curate the show. Eventually, they selected 20 artists, mostly from California, encompassing video, photography, painting and sculpture. Sam Easterson focuses on the animal's point of view quite literally, by attaching minicams to creatures including armadillos, falcons, scorpions and sheep, and letting them go on their way. The resulting clips end when the cam falls off and are shown without narrative. Other artists get that subjectivity more obliquely, such as Catherine Chalmers' video simulation of a cockroach moving through fauna and flora in "Safari" or Alison Ruttan's video of a man mimicking a prowling cat in "Impersonator."

Brooklyn-based artist Nina Katchadourian finds most human interactions with nature "meddlesome." As part of a series she's called "Uninvited collaborations with nature," she has made "GIFT / GIFT," a video in which she carefully inserts the letters G, I, F and T, made of thread, into a spider web. The spider then methodically expels the letters, one by one. The additional irony is that in Finnish, Katchadourian's native tongue, "gift" means poison.

In "Continuum of Cute," she explores how we rate animals on the basis of appearance. "I began looking for pictures online," she says by telephone. "There's no shortage of material." She finally selected 100, which she then arranged on a scale from very uncute to very cute.