Neal Auch

Like most of us, I was raised with a bucolic image of life on a farm: cows grazing green pastures while chickens scramble about the barn and pigs wallow lazily in mud pits.  This image, however pleasant, does not reflect the reality of contemporary factory farming practice, which all too often relies on cruelty and torture on an industrial scale.  Many of the animals we consume will have lived lives of intense suffering: confined in windowless sheds, densely-packed into cages where the spread of disease and parasites is rampant, fed additive-laced foods that bear little resemblance to a natural diet, or subject to various surgical mutilations.

It is all too easy to forget about the cruelty and suffering that underlies the animal products we interact with daily, through our meals, clothes, and furniture.  My work on the commodification of animal suffering focuses on meat products that are intended for human consumption; I buy everything that I work with at the butcher.  My aim is to present these food products in an unfamiliar context, where the ugliness and cruelty of the industrialized farming system becomes manifest. www.nealauch.com