The work of Barry Hylton takes our culture’s rendering of nature at face value, literally. Using novelty-store animal masks as his genre, Hylton surrounds viewers with a menagerie of perverse creatures. The masks have been altered: mounted, waxed, flocked – and with the addition of text, a manner of epigraph, each one is defined with something to say. Offensive, angry, humorous, loving, these characters expose a grotesque dialogue between language and nature, media and self. Referencing the classic TV show about a talking horse, the artist writes, "Mr. Ed continues to speak, with more guile than most horses I have known."

Barry Hylton is a Brooklyn based artist who received his MFA from the Tyler School of Art and is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Hylton has shown with Exit Art, NYC; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; White Columns, NYC; and Galerie Elizabeth Valleix Paris, France.