More bats

Working on some ideas for new pieces:

Yep, I'm still into the bat thing. It's hard to forget about - in Pennsylvania (the state in which I currently live), the Game Commission has failed to take steps to declare that bats are becoming endangered, therefore deciding not to move forward with protection and treatment, despite the fact that 98% of some of the state's bat populations have already died from White Nose. In keeping with our state's history of prioritizing mineral profits over public health and the environment, there were a lot of people who felt that helping the bats make a comeback - by doing things like limiting the hours windmills run and cutting back on logging and mining to stop the spread of the fungus - were too much of an economic sacrifice, and forced the Commission into backing down from their initial stance of considering bats endangered. Not good.

Night shots of Future Tenant installation

A few night shots:

install day 2

Put the finishing touches on the installation last night, including adding a little cluster of bats right up to the window. Night shots of the finished work to follow.

Hibernaculum install at Future Tenant

I'm in the process of installing hibernaculum, my piece comprised of many many little paper bats, at Future Tenant in downtown Pittsburgh.

 A picture of the individual disassembled "tiles" of bats:

Install help from the ever-handy Dave:

Getting tiles up on the wall. We built a plywood wall in the bay window to make a space large enough for one or two people to walk into and view the installation:

And a shot from the street:

I've got a bit more filling in and edge cleaning-up to do before I'm finished, but if you're downtown you can already check it out! The installation will be up for the whole month of May at Future Tenant, located at 819 Penn Avenue. Check their website for events - and note that because there are no exhibitions in May, the gallery will probably not be holding normal hours. But I may be there for a few afternoons, so I'll post dates and times here.

Environmental Aesthetics opening

Here they are! Pictures from the opening at Fe Gallery!

A view of hibernaculum as you enter the gallery:

 Some detail shots of the bats themselves:

And a view of the installation with people in it, for scale. The walls are about 13 feet tall.

Also a few pictures of some of the wonderful work in the show: Rise Nagin's collage of natural objects and Carin Mincemoyer's mirror-clouds in the gallery's bay windows.

Before I tell you anything about this piece, let me first say that I owe its existence to some very awesome people. hibernaculum would not have been possible without the time, materials, installation help, expertise, and support the following people have generously shared with me: Brandon at Laser Lab Studio, Sam Ditch, Deanna Mance, Alisa Michael, Chris and Kristen Osterwood, Christy Rollinson, David Rollinson, and Katherine Talcott. Also, it was hugely reassuring to work through my first installation with the other artists I showed with - their experience with installation art made everything a little less terrifying for me. Thank you all!

So. About this piece. If you've been reading this blog, you've noticed I've been thinking a lot lately about the invasive fungal infections that are suddenly killing off many bats in North America. This show ended up being the perfect opportunity to work with that idea, and expand on previous themes of paper-constructed animals to create a large-scale work. I wanted to use paper from natural history books to reference my thoughts about how we use science to make sense of the natural world, even in situations where the world is changing faster than we can understand it (often as the result of our own actions). In an earlier entry I mentioned one of the books I used, The Uncivilized Races, or, a Natural History of Man, and supplemented that with more material that was donated to me and that I found at used bookstores: books about native trees of Canada, a textbook on forestry, a book about endangered species from the 1970s, books on evolution.

These bats are all cut with a laser, from a template that I designed. Every single one is attached to cardboard shapes, backed by foam, that were prepared in my studio and installed at the gallery, with some re-adjusting, re-pinning, and filling in as I went. My best estimate of the number of bats is between 6,000 and 7,000, and they average about 100 per square foot.

As far as the shape, I spent a lot of time looking at photos of bats clustered in caves, but for this installation I felt it was more appropriate to respond to the space rather than create a simulation of a natural bat shape. After all, it was already apparent that these were flat paper objects. I did a lot of fussing and adjusting and freaking out about finishing the edges on the sloped part of the ceiling before I realized what I was actually doing was subconsciously making a map . . . which is why those edges remain un-rounded. To me it referenced the geometric structure underneath the bats, which wasn't so visible unless you really inspected the substrate carefully. It also reinforced the analogy between the cities of people, and the cities of bats.

This is the first truly large-scale piece I've ever done. A lot of people at the opening told me it reminded them of lichen, or fur, or leaves, or shelf fungi - all textures I'd hoped it would evoke. I really wanted the piece to be readable and interesting at a lot of levels, from the overall shape and appearance to the individual snippets of non-information legible on each bat.

So there it is! Many thanks to everyone who made it to the opening as well. If you are in Pittsburgh and didn't make it, I hope you can still get to see the piece. I'd welcome any comments or questions. Fe Gallery is open from 12 - 3 on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and is located at 4102 Butler Street between Fisk and Main Sts. in Lawrenceville. Environmental Aesthetics will be up until November 6th.

Paper bats

Just a quick update on the paper hibernaculum project - my bats came back today from Laser Lab Studio in Bloomfield and they look terrific. I'm really excited to start putting them all together to make the piece... and anyone who saw my locust installation knows I'm almost crying with joy over the time this will save me. Time I can spend constructing and eventually installing the piece, instead of cutting out a zillion paper shapes and giving myself carpal tunnel in the process. Hooray for technology!

Bats in crisis

A neighbor spotted some photos of tarantulas and hummingbirds in the last issue of Smithsonian magazine and passed in on to me, but a surprise waited for me within. I stumbled upon another article about white-nose fungus:

What is killing the bats?

It's not too long of an article, but worth reading, since it describes some of the specific ways scientists are trying to study the fungus: how to detect it, how it spreads, how exactly it affects bats. Opinions still seem divided over whether the most deadly symptoms are the weakening of wing membranes, the awakening of bats from hibernation, or some other irritation caused by the fungus.* The longer there is a lack of consensus on what exactly the fungus does, the longer it will take us to develop the most effective way to treat sick bats and stop it from spreading further.

I admit that I fear it could be too late already. This really disheartens me. These scientists are working around the clock to stay ahead of what is becoming a pandemic in the U.S. and their efforts don't seem to be working. White nose is still spreading faster than we can understand it or even track it. Even if we get that far, we're probably looking at losing the majority of the country's bat population, and, as the article states, it will take generations for the population to rebound. And it will come at a high price: a certain rise in the populations of mosquitoes and other insect pests, and thusly a rise in both mosquito-borne disease and crop failures.

I try to take solace in the words of Brooke Slack, one of the biologists studying the bats: "There's a sense of helplessness, [b]ut I don't feel like we can say, 'Well, we've got it, so we give up.' We've got an obligation to move forward."

I'm really excited about my upcoming bat piece - not just from the perspective of working for the first time on a large-scale installation, but also because I want other people to know what is happening too. I think it can seem like a niche issue (as in, Save the spotted two-toed purple hyrax!) but what we are really talking about is our food supply, our protection against disease, and preserving an incredibly important group of animals that occupies a key role in many ecological systems in America. And I really think this message can be spread without the finger-wagging and shaming that sometimes accompanies the most academic or sanctimonious environmental art.

* 9/25/11 A brief update on this - I've since read that starvation from waking up during the winter and irritation of the membrane seem to both be contributing to bat deaths. Better news (maybe) is that the fungus can be killed with fluconazole, which is commonly prescribed for human fungal infections. This of course raises concerns about what else we might accidentally kill if we start pumping aerated anti-fungals into caves, but it's a start. And the scientists are not giving up!

Twelve Batty Bat

New bats for this fall's Fe Gallery installation. It opens September 23rd; I'm aiming for a few thousand bats before then.

These bats will be a little less homogenous than in the last installation; I'm trying to use found paper from a variety of interesting sources: books on birds, maps on species distribution, photos of animal colonies, texts about exploration, invasion, etc.

Hibernaculum installation at Crazy Mocha

Here are some newer, better (sorta) pictures of the bat installation I did at Crazy Mocha Bloomfield. The piece was de-installed last night to make room for a new show opening this week, but it - or something like it - will likely reappear in my future works. I used this as a sort of installation "sketch" for what I'm thinking about at Fe Gallery for this fall.

bat crash

Last December, an article appeared in National Geographic about the white-nose fungus that is causing massive, frightening die-offs in bat colonies around North America. The fungus has been on the radar of bat enthusiasts for a few years now - everyone in Chautauqua was watching for it in 2008 - so it's not breaking news. (In fact, the PA Game Comission's map on this website indicates that it had already reached Buffalo by the end of 2010, so Chautauqua can't be far behind.)

This article comes at a scary time for people paying attention to animals around the world, especially in the wake of the catastrophic oil disaster in the Gulf. It's even easier to sensationalize every ecological hiccup in the wake of a string of ill-timed (and highly publicized) animal die-offs in the winter of 2010-2011. Yet, it's pretty clear that the fungus is not normal, and it's spreading fast. At this point it's more a question of when the fungus will reach every bat in America, not if. And with many species already critically endangered, and all bats responsible for a lot of pollinating and insect control, the impact could truly be devastating on not just our food supply, but ecological systems across the continent.

I did some poking around to see how much more we'd figured out since the article was published. I'll admit I didn't go digging in library archives - just the internet - but it seems to me that not too much has changed. We're still waiting on evidence, I guess. I read a botanist's website that pointed out that we still don't have absolute scientific proof that the fungus is the actual cause of death. At best, at this point it's assumed to be an indirect cause. Scientists are still not absolutely sure - "scientific proof" speaking - that the fungus is what's disrupting hibernation and causing the snowballing of fat loss, metabolism disruption, and wing damage that is probably leading to mid-winter deaths. Right now, it's a probable guess.

I got to thinking about what it means to have scientific certainty about anything. The amount of irrefutable evidence required, the countless hours spent by lab workers, PhD candidates, scholars, etc. in search of the truth. The enormous amount of effort building skyscrapers of scientific knowledge, brick by brick, that can be dismantled by a public that is ill-informed, uninterested, or driven by fear.

Science, as illuminating as it is, is sometimes like a laser pointer seeking out a fish in the ocean. As much as we're able to discover with our advanced methods of seeing, sensing, and analyzing the word, a big part of me worries that the research won't ever keep up with the rate at which we're changing the planet. I wonder if we will find the truth quickly enough.