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.

new bird collage-box

I haven't been posting enough images lately, so here are some shots of a new piece I'm working on:

Collective wisdom from my old sketchbooks

One of the hard things, when you're painting, is, "what?"
     Gary Hume, artist

You don't owe anything to the work you've done previously.
     Chris Sperandio, artist

Nature is a mirror onto which we project our own ideas and values, but it is also a material reality that sets limits . . . the nonhuman world is real and autonomous . . . but the paradox of our human lives is that we can never know that world at first hand.
     William Cronon, environmental historian

Don't wait to do your "good" ideas. Act on every idea; you'll inevitably make bad art. Don't strive to get it right on the first try. Strive to make art each time you have an idea. Don't strike ideas down, because you achieve by doing, not thinking.
     paraphrased from Deborah Aschheim, artist

Plato suggests . . . that memory is like an aviary inside your head, with all these birds flying around, such that you might reach in for a ringdove and accidentally pull out a turtle dove instead.
     David Wilson, director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, as quoted by author Lawrence Weschler

The ivory tower of science is in a ruin. Science is not a pure realm of truth beyond the taints of ideology and business, but a field of ideas enmeshed in a power struggle. Increasingly industry and economics dictate the direction and priorities of research. Whilst informed by science, we are ever vigilant against claims of scientific neutrality, and ever skeptical of the "official story" of natural history presented by scientific institutions.
     Mark Dion, extracted from a manifesto for artists working with or about the living world


We are the species in control, and it is up to us.
     Donald Johanson, anthropologist and discoverer of Austalopithecus afarensis fossil "Lucy"

so, an update

It's one month later. How has my "make art every day" mantra been going?

Well, I'm reminded of the five-year plan I was encouraged to make as an undergrad in my senior thesis class. On Saturday I'll be participating in a school-to-professional forum at Carnegie Mellon University this weekend, so I dug up my senior packet and five-year plan to take a look at what I thought I had in store for myself back in 2005:

spring 2006: graduate from CMU
summer 2006: work part-time and find a job in one of the following cities: Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago
fall 2006: relocate to new city and begin working part or full time at a nonprofit institution
end of 2006: apply to grad school for the fall of 2007
2007: start grad school

Had I followed this, I'd probably have an MFA by now, and I'd almost certainly be living somewhere else. For those of you following along at home, I've managed to stay in Pittsburgh, work 3 years in retail, get married, buy a house, and ... not go to grad school. On the other hand, I've had over ten shows in the last few years, made enormous strides in my art, had an awesome residency and later job in Chautauqua, and, well, hey, I'm married and I own a house. And finally, after a few years of retail and unemployment I did score a job at an awesome nonprofit. Not so bad.

While I was poking around on my hard drive I also uncovered a lot of old cover letters for job opportunities long past (unsurprisingly, a few were for the Mattress Factory). The letters and my plans were a window into my 21-year-old self, who, at the time, was ready to hit the diving board running and plunge headfirst into a mix of prestigious jobs and higher education.

Let it suffice to say that life rarely unfolds the way in which you intend. I snagged the first steady job I could find out of college and intended for it to be a temporary stop on my way to career greatness. I found myself in the same place two years later treading water in a job I wasn't super thrilled about, plagued by doubt about my situation, my education, even why I was making art and how to deal with it existing solely in the echo chamber of my own judgment. But, after a residency, a year of unemployment, then returning to my old job, and finally moving on to the Mattress Factory, I do feel like I've gone somewhere.

Let it also suffice to say that as a young person ready to flee the college scene I really underestimated Pittsburgh. I confess I thought the city had nothing to offer beyond a few larger museums, but I've found a lot of small galleries, local talent, and a supportive and genuine atmosphere that has been a good place to develop as an artist. I do think we are a city poised on the brink of a greater role in arts, technology, and re-invention than we've had before.

Okay, so, what I am really taking up all this space to say is, it's hard to predict in what direction life will take you. Best laid plans of mice and men yadda yadda. Lesson learned, although sometimes I get pretty down when I think about how much I should have accomplished five years out of school.

Long story short, I broke my promise to myself in early January and, feeling creatively uninspired by nature fast asleep in the dead of winter, haven't made much of anything. Tonight I'm about to sit down and try my hardest to re-start.

2010: my year in review. Plus, uh, the future.

This was a fortunate and exciting year for me that involved:

• showing in four exhibitions
• participating in the Three Rivers Arts Fest as an Emerging Artist, and winning Best in Show
• moving on to a new job as Volunteer Coordinator/Visitor Services Assistant at the Mattress Factory
• way more bicycling
• buying a house
• finally going on a honeymoon with my husband
• ending the year with a great collaboration between me and Deanna
• my first official press coverage in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

2010 was chaotic and somewhat stressful, but full of amazing opportunities. I'm looking forward to the coming year, and I've decided to take some time off of exhibiting to create new bodies of work. I need to carve out more time in my life to create and explore, and I felt like a lot of my "art" time this past year was spent prepping work I had already done. Some goals for the coming year:

• make art every day
• draw more
• get back into (clarinet) playing shape
• draw inspiration from the work of others without feeling intimidated or defeated (constant battle. suggestions from those fighting it?)

I've got a big year ahead. Happy 2011!

You must read this

I'm a big fan of WNYC's public radio show Radiolab, wherein "Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow" in a manner most interestingly. Topics range from linguistics to animal behavior to mathematical theory to what happens when you sleep, and it always manages to be fascinating, if sometimes a little conceptually scattered. Robert Krulwich, one of the show's two hosts, maintains an occasional blog on NPR's website that follows a similar exploratory arc, and the latest entry was a great one (read it here).

He covers the work of two people: Vi Hart's funny, inventive videos about "doodling" and mathematics, and a lengthly essay by Paul Lockhart about the (many) problems with mathematics education. I really, really recommend watching the video and reading the essay in full.

Lockhart's essay is damning, interesting, and a great read. There are some problems - for one, he lacks a sophisticated understanding of what visual art is when he compares it to music and mathematics, but to be fair he hasn't had the post-post-modern conceptual perspective (or indoctrination) that most of us contemporary artists have. Now that art can exist solely in the realm of "ideas," it can be a concept, an action, a performance. (I know this isn't really new to anyone familiar with, say, Jackson Pollock, but every so often I'm amazed by how revolutionary and far-seeing these ideas were in the 50s and 60s. We take it for granted now that we aren't all stuck painting placid landscapes trying to get into the Paris Conservatory.) Art, like pure mathematics, need not be confined to the physical world. The best art never has been. Like Lockhart points out, Michelangelo had other things on his mind than decorating when he envisioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

His critique of math educators and the "institution" of learning is absolutely scathing. I'm not sure how I would feel if I were a math teacher and read this. (Or any teacher. He's pretty harsh on the idea of pedagogy overall.) All the same, I think he has some great points to make about the need to approach mathematics with the same creativity, playfulness, and inventive problem-solving we use to explore music, art, poetry, and the other arts.

While I read, I realized that many of my own artistic and intellectual heroes - Leonardo da Vinci, Leon Battista Alberti, James Audubon, Archimedes - approached mathematical or logistical problems with a creativity we reserve now for artmaking. Having a teacher take this tack with me might have avoided the complete mathematical paralysis I have as an adult. I can hardly approach math beyond simple arithmetic, although I don't really care about that (you don't think I use trig when I'm engraving, do you?). Instead, I wish that I had been encouraged to think about mathematical problems the way he describes, by formulating my own proofs through creative thinking, trial and error, rebuttal, discussion.

There is sort of a tie-in here, finally. Working with Deanna over the past year and doing a lot of free-form, responsive, automatic drawing (or "doodling," a word we both hate) has really put my educational background in perspective. Sometimes I feel really conflicted about what having a BFA means, particularly from an established school with a great reputation, like, ahem, Carnegie Mellon. In the end, I feel like I learned what I was supposed to from art school - how to see, how to think, how to create. Your pencil, and what comes out of it, is not really as important as what's happening between your ears and behind your eyes. Yet, getting an education in art is always sort of walking a tightrope over a sea of institutionalized technique, and some schools fall into it, even the best ones. For years, that technique was what I thought I wanted - that I couldn't be a real artist until I learned perspective, or anatomy, or how to use oil paint properly. CMU is a rarity in art schools in that it really stresses a conceptual vocabulary in its art students, to the admitted sacrifice of technical facility in some traditional areas.

Frankly, at this point I couldn't care less about whether I can draw a proper vanishing point to create perfect bricks in two-point perspective. I still hate oil paint. I'm pretty good at anatomy. But in the end, those are tools. They're not your vision. It's harder to be original and creative and exploratory, to make mistakes and search in the dark, but that's what real art - and math - is. As a person and artist who's always craved structure, rules, and predictability, it is a particular challenge to remind myself that the people goofing off in class with their own amazing projects are sometimes the visionaries on the way to greatness. It's a challenge to maintain spontaneity and creativity and free thinking. I try, though.

The Forest Through the Trees in Trib-Review

Deanna Mance's and my show gets reviewed in the Trib!

2 artists work on the big picture, details, in 'The Forest Through the Trees'