‘The Sublime is Meow’ takes the art of cat toys seriously

More than 40 Philly artists contributed work to an exhibition at Big Ramp in Kensington honoring the pets of so-called “childless cat ladies.”

Gallery co-founder Chris Hammes demonstrates a puppet duck spinning on a motorized hook by Ollie Goss. (Peter Crimmins/WHYY)

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First, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance blamed the erosion of America’s maternal instincts on “childless cat ladies.” Then his running mate Donald Trump unwittingly created a meme when he falsely claimed immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the cats and dogs of their neighbors.

“I thought there was a really strange thing where animals suddenly became part of this very human world of electoral politics,” said Chris Hammes, an artist and co-founder of Big Ramp, a small art gallery in Kensington.

He is not alone. When Hammes put out a call for submissions to “The Sublime is Meow,” an exhibition of artist-made cat toys, more than 40 artists sent in work.

These include felted art supplies dangling from strings by Ayla Shadya Alsebai, a mouse toy with its head cut off and fixed to the wall as a tiny taxidermy wall mount by Shawn Beeks, and a vial of a testosterone cypionate, a hormone injection commonly used by people in gender transition, crafted by artist Elliot Engles as a soft plushy.

Contributing artist Katie Dillon Low describes herself as a “gold-levelstar cat lady.”

“I do have a very special cat. Her name is Nugget,” she said, explaining that she sews her feline clothing and even owns a leash harness for when they go on camping trips together.

Low, who earned a master’s in fine arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, submitted a piece inspired by conceptual art progenitor Marcel Duchamp and his Readymades, or common objects elevated to fine art through presentation, such as a toilet.

Low swept underneath her couch, stove, refrigerator and every piece of furniture in her home to rediscover the lost objects Nugget had played with: twist ties, little felt balls pulled from the fringe of a throw pillow, hair scrunchies, the plastic pull-tops from milk containers and empty spools of medical tape.

She cataloged and pinned each artifact to a large board inside a plexiglass vitrine, as though they were specimens prepared for a natural science display. She titled it “The Hoard.”

“Some of it is literally trash,” Low said. “There’s no reason, really, to buy a cat toy because for a cat, anything is a toy.”

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Like Low and her penchant for Duchamp, many contributors to “The Sublime is Meow” brought high levels of sophistication to cat toys. Jacob Lunderby made a suspended, horizontal wheel dragging dangling figures as a direct reference to Bruce Nauman’s Carousel. Libby Rosa’s “Stairway to Heaven” are wall-mounted and carpeted climbing steps resembling Salvador Dali’s melting clocks in “The Persistence of Memory.”

Artist Matthew Witmer took a formal conceptual approach by roughly punching a mouse-sized hole into the gallery’s drywall and installing inside it a small ball and pieces of paper that flit around by the force of a fan. Gallery visitors must awkwardly lower their faces to the floor to look into the ground-level hole, but it is at the perfect height for any feline art lovers.

“A lot of the people in the show, probably all, did the schooling thing where they teach us what these rules are that we cling to about what a gallery is supposed to be and what an artist is supposed to be,” Low said. “It’s a bit silly because we’re making cat toys and hanging them in the gallery at the height that cats can enjoy them, but still doing it with the seriousness that we would for any other art showing.”

The manifesto for “The Sublime is Meow” rallies “childless cat lovers and their world-destroying comrades!” (yes, this cat toy show comes with a manifesto), and its title riffs on the seminal 1947 essay “The Sublime is Now” by abstract painter Barnett Newman. But Hammes admits he created the exhibition as a gas.

“I’m trying to just be very genuine and honest,” he said. “But also kind of sarcastic.”

Many of Hammes recent projects have involved intensely emotional and political topics: he recently designed an outdoor space at the Prevention Point in Kensington to help people recover from opioid addiction; a recent show at Big Ramp by Palestinian artist Yaqeen Yamani “Will You Share Rage With Me?” involved a benefit for Palestinian refugees in Gaza trying to cross into Egypt; and he is currently working on a sculptural piece for Mural Arts Project about victims of gun violence.

Hammes said he needed a break from projects with such weighty gravitas. Cats led the way.

“I was recently trying to describe what art is, trying to come up with a quotable thing. So I’m going to test it out now,” he said. “I think art is when you take a really dumb idea comedically seriously, but then no one gets to laugh.”

“The stuff that we do as artists seems, to an outside public, very silly,” he said. “But we take it really seriously.”

“The Sublime is Meow” is on view at Big Ramp until Nov. 30. Hammes is considering letting people reserve time slots so they can bring their cats in to explore the toys on their own, without other cats to worry about. He is also considering, pending interest, taking the exhibition on tour.

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