Buried in the annals of sketch-comedy history is a bit from “The State,” MTV’s 1990s take on the genre, in which a couple attending a dinner party inquire about the terrific neon-blue meat they’re eating. “It’s muppet!” the hostess explains. The hosts then showcase their “Sesame Street”-informed hunting skills by loudly asking for someone to help them count to four. A green muppet swiftly appears, only to meet a quick and merciless end. Equal parts horrifying and hilarious, the sketch actually presents a new way of thinking about what — or whom — we eat.
Jude Griebel’s work is a more artistically nuanced, but also dark and funny, take on the subject. In “Elegy for the Consumed,” a solo show on view at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, the Canadian artist presents sculptures and paintings of the animals we eat and asks us to question our complicated relationship with them. In “Migrations,” a concurrent show in the adjoining gallery, Montréal artist Robin Crofut-Brittingham looks at how we observe and imagine birds. Both shows provoke a viewer to ask how artistic traditions inform the ways we think about animals.
Sarah Freeman, director of exhibitions at the art center, curated the two shows in the context of a programming season that reflects on the natural world. As these two came together, she said, she realized that “they’re both artists who are so technically accomplished and doing really interesting things with their materials,” as well as dealing with similar subjects. Crofut-Brittingham is “talking about the human/non-human worlds colliding,” she said, “which is what Jude is doing in a very, very different way.”
Griebel’s show begins with a parade of “Revenants” who process along a wide plinth that spans one side of the gallery. These are detailed sculptures of creatures ready to eat. A steamed clam strides boldly forward on spindly, human-like legs. It’s followed by lobsters that hold flags aloft despite their rubber-banded claws; a mustard-covered bratwurst that walks on legs made of other sausages, eerily reminiscent of a dachshund; a 3-foot-tall prawn, garnished with parsley and holding a lemon wedge; and a 6-foot-tall roast chicken, bearing a sprig of rosemary on its shoulder like a soldier with a rifle in a Memorial Day parade.
The scene is both jaunty and unsettling. These sculptures are made from a variety of materials — wood and wire internal armatures, resin, and air-dry clay — and exquisitely painted to look like the real thing. The chicken’s skin appears crispy and crunchy even as its legs seem to be in motion; the lobsters’ shells are speckled and glossy, as though they were just pulled from a restaurant’s live tank. The scale is wrong enough to throw a viewer off-balance. Neither the sausages nor the clam have eyes, exactly, but seem to be looking right at you nonetheless.
In other works, Griebel references 19th-century European servingware styles in which foods were presented on dishes depicting the animals themselves — platters shaped like fish or milk pitchers shaped like cows. In “Fish Farm,” a 27-inch-high ceramic sculpture, a school of fish almost jumps out of a fishing net shaped like a fisherman’s boot decorated with red floats.
Griebel, who is based in Calgary and New York City, created the work at an artist’s residency with the Kohler home-goods manufacturing company in Wisconsin. He clearly made smart use of its industrial production resources. He glazed the fish with a mirror finish, with painted details that look like pen-and-ink. While reminiscent of kitschy decorative sculptures that idealize, say, a fisherman’s boot, the scale and masterful craft in the work lend it seriousness and pathos.
Griebel’s animals don’t all seem upset about their fate, though a few hold signs proclaiming “Disaster Looms.” But then you find yourself asking: How would you know if a lobster were in emotional distress? Griebel’s work doesn’t necessarily ask us to stop eating creatures but clearly wants us to feel less comfortable about it. “He’s trying to give the things that are about to be consumed some sort of agency,” Freeman said. “There’s a consciousness there.”
How would you know if a lobster were in emotional distress?
Crofut-Brittingham’s gorgeous watercolor illustrations, which she created for The Illuminated Book of Birds, deal not with how we consume animals but with how we envision and categorize them. The compositions are all in the same format, 32-by-24-inch works on paper featuring groupings of birds from different regions of the world. Crofut-Brittingham researched each species extensively, and her images are informed by not just scientific information, such as which birds share a habitat, but also by their mythological and cultural significance.
“Birds of Chinese Gardens,” for instance, includes the golden pheasant, which many believe to be related to a phoenix, and the Mandarin duck; in the text of her book, Crofut-Brittingham tells the folktale recounting the birds’ origin.
Alongside those illustrations, the artist presents works that are no less beautiful but much weirder. Some are multipart drawings shaped like stained-glass windows or altarpieces, and they borrow the narrative sensibility — often absent of explanation — found in religious art. These are intricate forest landscapes populated by birds, tapirs, leopards and lemurs, as well as tattooed humans with elaborate bird masks. Gold leaf accents and delicately drawn jungles add to the sense of strange wonder in these pieces, which are reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s creations but set in paradise rather than hell.
The paintings are informed by 19th-century botanical and naturalist illustrations. But, as Griebel does with decorative servingware, Crofut-Brittingham manages to combine an appreciation of the art form with an acknowledgment of the real harms done to animals, even by those who admire their beauty; some of the species she paints are now extinct.
Both shows offer visitors an intriguing vision of an animal kingdom in which humans no longer ignore the consequences of our actions. Or, as Crofut-Brittingham puts it in her artist statement, “the reemergence of nature in the aftermath of collapse.” ➆
This article appears in Animal Issue • 2026.
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