Schneemann once declared that “the cat was my medium.” While Schneemann asserts the works on display as La Niña’s creaturely creations, Tooth and Paw offers us a chance to appreciate Schneemann’s visionary sensibility and the crucial role of her cats in that vision. The show is a playful premise for reflection on Schneemann’s most precious interlocutors and the radical insights she attained from them: a new modality by which to challenge the destructive configurations of her “guilty culture” and their repressive frames of reference. Schneemann writes: “The domestic cat represents potential harmony, the bridge from invisible to visible—the connection between the ineffable to what can be given plastic form.” By tooth and by paw, then, La Niña shows us how we might continue to learn from Schneemann’s work.

P·P·O·W presents La Niña’s assemblages in their interstitial position as the work of an animal and as an embodiment of its being, its propulsive force, that was affirmed and revered by Schneemann as an important inspiration for her own transformative actions. In this concentration on La Niña’s work, we learn anew Schneemann’s revelatory commitment to the “tactile activity” of her Kinetic Theater projects with and through her cats’ fur and claws, its teeth, the low frequency vibration of its purr. Tooth and Paw is in ludic and solemn conversation with Schneemann’s landmark works Lateral Splay (1963), Fuses (1964-67), Snows (1967), Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-76), Vespers Pool (1999-2000), and Infinity Kisses (2008). And so with this honorary show, we send kisses to infinity for Carolee.

A reception for Tooth and Paw will be held in coordination with a day-long screening of Schneemann’s film and video works—many of which feature Schneemann’s feline collaborators—presented by our friends at Electronic Arts Intermix.