Ariel Rich’s practice explores the shifting boundaries between human and animal, natural and artificial, and the ways these distinctions are mediated through systems of representation. Working across painting, performance, and installation, Rich constructs environments that question how we aestheticize, domesticate, and control the living world—including our own bodies. In Pastures, for example, the figure of the cow becomes both subject and symbol, its form abstracted into a site of projection for human desires, fears, and cultural narratives. Drawing on medieval bestiaries, carnivalesque traditions, and theories of hyperreality, Rich creates spaces that are deliberately artificial—simulations of the natural world that foreground their own constructedness. Visitors are invited not merely to observe but to participate, becoming part of the spectacle through ritual gestures that highlight their complicity within the work. Through an interplay of irony, discomfort, and absurdity, Rich’s practice disrupts fixed meanings and opens space for reflection on our estrangement from nature and the increasingly unstable line between reality and representation.