Animal artwork, like the canvases created by these elephants at the Maesa elephant camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2005, has become a $100-million business, says SAW Gallery curator Stefan St-Laurent. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)A contemporary art gallery in Ottawa is balancing a playful look at the artistic creativity of animals with an ethical discussion about exploitation in a new exhibition.

Ottawa's SAW Gallery has mixed artistic canvases by wild animals, collaborations between domestic pets and their owners and human interpretations of natural phenomenon like intricate bird nests and winding termite mounds with a host of historical material for the exhibit Animal House: Works of Art made by Animals.

The goal is to inspire people "to think a bit more about how animals can be creative in the wild," Stefan St-Laurent, the show's curator, told CBC News on Monday.

"More and more, we have environmental destruction [and] the extinction of species. We have to have new ways of working with animals if we’re going to co-habitate or co-exist together."

Accidental creations vs. 'hard-core' training

Some of the featured artists were serendipitous discoveries, like one of St-Laurent's favourites: a turtle named Koopa whose owner discovered she made "beautiful, luminescent painting strokes" when she walked across a wet canvas.

However, some of the animal art world's most famous names — like south-east Asian elephants Ramona and Nappakhao — were trained for years. Many animals are forced by handlers to paint for hours every day.

Creations by gorillas and elephants have fetched as much as $20,000 a canvas.

"I saw some YouTube videos with some elephants producing figurative work, even some representations of other elephants … cherry blossoms, banana flowers, some are elephant shapes. That's hard-core training," said St-Laurent.

'Good work is when we see that the relationship between the owner and the animal is full of love and respect.'—Stefan St-Laurent, Saw Gallery

"It's the same kind of complex training that it would take [to teach], let's say, a tiger to jump through a fiery hoop."

The idea of getting animals to create art was popularized in several successful campaigns introduced by financially troubled American zoos and conservation facilities as fundraisers during the 1980s.

However, there has since been an explosion of commercial "art academies" in countries like Thailand and Indonesia that train elephants to produce tens of thousands of canvases, industrial-style, each year.

"To me it's the same old story. We just found a new way of exploiting animals that looks like it's a charitable cause," said St-Laurent, who says that in the past decade the animal art industry has become a $100-million business.

"For elephants to be fundraising to pay the salaries of their guardians and owners is quite nonsensical."

St-Laurent believes that animals can be creative, whether by instinct or by training.

"Good work is when we see that the relationship between the owner and the animal is full of love and respect," he said.

Animal House, for which admission is pay-what-you-can, continues at the SAW Gallery until Sept. 26.