Livorno council says residents have complained of foul smell after rise in number of pets

Dog owners in an Italian port city will be required to clean up their pets’ urine from public spaces or face fines of up to €500.

Luca Salvetti, the mayor of Livorno, on the Tuscan coast, introduced the measure after complaints from residents about the smell of dog urine, particularly in parks and children’s play areas.

An animal welfare organization has been forced to deny that its distressing photo of 250 dogs crammed into a single house is AI-generated -- in a damning reflection of modern media literacy.

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Cats and dogs can now fill the hours their owners are at work with a dedicated all-day streaming channel for pets launched by Chinese tech giant Tencent.

Clips of a duckling swimming in a bath or two happy pooches patrolling their neighbourhood are examples of the curated programming on “PetTV”.

The new channel on Tencent Video — China’s most popular online streaming platform — is meant to keep pets company while alone or can act as an activity for animals and humans to enjoy together.

“This is all dog content, when will the cat programme be on?” one person engrossed in the service wrote in the chatroom on PetTV’s streaming page.

Tencent Video described PetTV as a “24-hour happiness hub specially designed for your furry kids” in a post on social media app WeChat introducing the service last weekend.

Dogs and cats’ senses are different to humans’, so the channel’s colours, refresh rates and audio frequencies have been designed to suit their specific needs, it said.

PetTV is available to paid subscribers of Tencent Video, which said its market research found that 66 per cent of dog owners leave the television on for their pets when they are out.

But the streaming service isn’t the only pet-specific media on the market.

Popular Headspace mindfulness app posted a YouTube video this week titled: “When your pets miss you, play this: 6 hour calming music for dogs and cats”.

Tencent Video will also take advantage of third-party content including airing America’s DogTV — the world’s first TV channel and streaming service for pets.

The value of China’s growing urban pet market is estimated to reach 405 billion yuan ($59 billion) in 2028, according to a recent report by PetData.cn.

On average last year, Chinese households spent more than 3,000 yuan (US$435) on each dog and more than 2,000 yuan on each cat for their care needs.

Misato Sano’s studio is replete with piles of wooden offcuts, heavy lumber, woodworking equipment, and flowing natural light. The Miyagi-based artist has been sculpting charismatic dogs for several years, steadily adding more distinct characters to her growing pack.

Self-portraiture remains a consistent theme within Sano’s practice. Each dog evokes a different emotion mirroring the artist’s personality, ranging from shy and skittish to excited and silly. “Visualizing my inner self through expressions and gestures full of charm and humor has also become an opportunity to deepen my self-love,” she shares.

Sano’s distinctive woodcarving techniques are exemplary of the artist’s signature style. Dimpled surfaces, for instance, evoke different types of dog coats and allow for color variance to come through upon the finishing application of oil paint. Working with camphor wood, the sculptural exaggeration of physical features such as limbs, bulbous tufts of fur, and even nails add to the body of work’s playful appeal.

These rhythmic textures and amusing design choices have also lent themselves to explorations of embroidery and illustration. Meditative stitches and repetitive, gridded ink drawings are a continuation of the artist’s dialogue with herself.

Sano is gearing up for an exciting year. Later this month, her work will be on view in a duo exhibition at the Kan Hai Art Museum in Taiwan. In August, the artist’s work is traveling to the states for Nucleus Portland’s 10th anniversary show, before a third exhibition at Igoone Arai in her native Miyagi, Japan. Keep up with the artist’s tail-wagging adventures by following her on Instagram.

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Any dog owner can appreciate the kind of unfettered, often visceral reactions canines have to everything from their favorite treats to a scurrying squirrel to another dog passing by the window. Their lack of inhibition and legendary fidelity bring comfort, routine, and goofiness to our daily lives despite their total unawareness of their effects on us. For Stephen Morrison, curiosity and play find their way into vibrant, quirky paintings that “invite viewers to rediscover the magic and absurdity often obscured by the routine,” he says.

Morrison’s practice has lately revolved around trompe l’œil compositions of everyday objects and tableaux in which dogs’ features appear unexpectedly. A snout stands in for the flap of a handbag or juts out from the side of a Pepsi can. His current solo exhibition, Dog Show #5: Field Recordings at SLAG&RX, centers on a series of objects referencing places he worked on the pieces—Paris, New York City, and Maine—that also play important roles in his life.

Morrison’s own memories and connections find their way into his collection of books, foods, photographs, and other items in an almost seek-and-find fashion. At first glance, the tableaux appear simply as collections of everyday things like vases, fruit, and cameras. But upon closer inspection, tiny visages appear along with references to dogs, from bones stitched into patchwork backgrounds to the sleepy face of a pooch in the center of a starfish and a bunch of green grapes with puppy faces. Always relaxed, even sleepy, the dogs’ expressions evoke a calm sweetness, even nostalgia, paired with a sense of abundance.

In this series, the artist grapples with what belonging means, from revisiting his childhood home in Maine to thinking about his past decade in New York City to spending two months in Paris, where, “despite being married to a Frenchman, having many French friends, and having spent considerable time in the city, I had never felt at home,” he says. “The ornate beauty of the architecture and the sense I have of everything being solidly ‘in its place’ makes it hard to feel inspired there for me.” So, he set out to explore that sense of disjointedness and creative conflict.

France is referenced in Morrison’s paintings by backgrounds of toile, or toile de jouy, a fabric design popular in the 18th century that features pastoral scenes, while Maine is represented by patchwork quilts he co-designed with his mother, who actually stitched them before they were incorporated into the works. “By bringing the objects and backgrounds into my dog world, I’ve rewritten my external material world through this lens, creating a new and more uniquely personal vision of these places,” he says.

Morrison will be an artist-in-residence at BUoY in Tokyo this summer, where he’s looking forward to incorporating Japanese textiles into a new series of paintings. He’s also preparing for a pop-up solo exhibition at Lazy Mike Gallery in Seoul and a group exhibition at Hashimoto Contemporary. Dog Show #5: Field Recordings continues through March 28 in New York. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Stephen Morrison’s Trompe-L’œil ‘Dog World’ Paintings Are Fetching appeared first on Colossal.