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.

The Forest Through The Trees

Hello again, everyone. So I had another one of those "update every other day" weeks in February and haven't paid enough subsequent attention to this blog. Regardless, here are some very overdue photos of my and Deanna's opening for The Forest Through The Trees. Details of some of the pieces can be found in one of my earlier entries.

From left to right: Deanna's work, a collaborative installation of tiny paper birds in bottles, and more collaborative drawings.

The fox on the wall is a watercolor of mine, as is the blue desk filled with paper birds. The birch boxes filled with intaglio and collage are Deanna's.

Two pieces of mine: a "bird chorus" of tiny stuffed intaglio birds, and an installation of paper locusts. I started the locust project in Chautauqua in 2009 and I'm really glad I finally got to try it out. It seemed like I spent forever printing and assembling hundreds of these, but I have to admit I was a little disappointed with how small the whole mass looked on the wall together. 

A shot of our collaborative drawings

Deanna's work and admirers

Since my last update, I've continued to think about the bat die-offs and how I might interpret them through a piece like the paper locusts. Fortunately, I have been invited to explore these ideas in a show this fall, so brace yourselves for more photos of paper animals. 

As I delve into ideas for this show, I continue to find myself influenced by the past too. Most people who have been to the Mattress Factory Museum in the past few years have probably seen Ruth Stanford's What Remains on Sampsonia Way, an installation she made on the front of an old row house commemorating the lives of that house's former occupants. Photos at that link also show the piece she made on the inside, called In the Dwelling House. I had the pleasure of helping Ruth with the installation of the latter work, and getting an intimate view of her perspective on the traces people leave behind in cities has had a permanent impact on my work. (And, um, you'll notice that cabinet stocked with glass jars filled with detritus found in the house - a big visual and conceptual influence for me, obviously.) I draw animals, but in essence I've really felt that my work is about the way that humans perceive nature, and how concepts like antiquity and preciousness and knowledge influence how we show and talk about "nature" to other humans. Also, as I've settled in Pittsburgh, a city truly at the crossroads of ghosts from the past and promises of the future, her works about what has been have continued to resonate.

One of the front stones of the house has been replaced with a stone bearing a quote from novelist Italo Calvino, from his book Invisible Cities, a short work of fiction about Marco Polo in the court of Kublai Khan, describing cities he's visited in his travels across Asia. I've owned a copy for years, but finally sat down and read it. It really spoke to me, a lover of museums and old things, a person who has lived abroad in a place that felt bizarrely more like home, and a simultaneously exploring, begrudging, and affectionate occupant of a very strange city. A few passages I marked:

"This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech."

"Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a part of his past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer posses lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."

Somewhere in the intersection of this, and Ruth's work, and the bat die-off, is the genesis of new pieces. Oh, and I'm planning another collaboration, too, this time with my friend and fellow Chautauqua alum Sara Gibson. A small subset of her work is found at her blog, where it will be obvious that we share a love of nature, glass containers, and clusters of small objects. Stay tuned, everyone. 

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.