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I love when art intrudes on life, muscling its way into quotidian
events, conveying new significance to the status quo.
The other day I noticed what appeared to be a couple of twigs
stuck to one side of our back door. Upon closer inspection I discovered our ordinary portal had
become the love nest for a pair of mating mantises. I ran outside every 15 minutes for the next hour, hoping to
be there for the main event.
My sudden attentiveness to the
insect world is thanks to d berman Gallery's recent exhibition
of color photographs by New York-based Catherine Chalmers.
Her 40-by-60 inch chromogenic prints turn the natural world upside
down, causing human viewers to pause and reconsider.
We humans ordinarily pay no attention to nature's mating and
eating games, but when they're presented hundreds of times life size
on a gallery wall, as with the mantises, it's much easier to submit to
prurient voyeurism than to turn away.
Chalmer's photographs both delight and, occasionally, repulse
The dramatic white backdrops
Chalmers employs suggest a theatrical rather than natural setting,
jarring the viewer even further, though the photographer explains that
she is simply removing distractions.
Her graphic, theatrically scaled images are much more artful
artifice than natural science.
Back to the mantises: when they
finish copulating, Ms. Mantis eats her partner's face off, and then
devours the rest of him. While
I missed the action outside my house, this sequence is shown
explicitly in Sex (during) /Sex
(after). Chalmers has
obtained and sheltered mantises, pinkies (baby mice), snakes,
caterpillars, and frogs, photographing them as they eat, copulate, and
die. "My job is
about 90 percent zookeeping and 10 percent photography," she
says, adding that she does not harm her subjects, as some critics have
suggested. "I put my
energy into raising animals, not hurting them."
I frankly doubt that there is a
huge audience ready to live with nature so exploded in scale and
isolated from context. The
rest of us can find Chalmer's "encounters between mates,
predators, and prey” in Food Chain, a book published by Aperture. The book’s images portray a brilliantly colored food chain:
jade green caterpillars eating a juicy red tomato, praying mantis
eating a caterpillar (revealing its juicy red guts), a tarantula
eating a praying mantis, and ... well, you get the point.
Rob Ziebell,
a photographer living in Castroville, Texas, offered somewhat more
lyrical nature experiences as a counterpoint to Chalmers's nature
studies. If Chalmers uses
living nature to go for the jugular, Ziebell concentrates on flora
rather than fauna, juxtaposing vegetables and fruit against richly
patterned backgrounds to create settings that are positively baroque.
His portraits are also displayed much larger than life, in
20by-24 inch and 30-by-40 inch prints; sometimes he carves or cuts his
subjects, or arranges them -in positions that suggest they are doing
more than waiting to become breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Of particular
poignancy to me were twin peas in a huge, single pod presented
vertically against a particularly lush floral print background.
This particular Fuji Supergloss Print inspired me (the mother
of identical twins girls) to return for second and third looks.
In fact, all of Ziebell's color-drenched photos reward close
consideration. They glow
with a mysterious light that uncannily highlights their central images
with an otherworldly flame that shines from within.
Hardly natures morts, his
garishly colored arrangements throb with life, albeit life that
appears alien in origin. Perhaps
this facility with lighting can be traced to Ziebell's experience as a
filmmaker (his feature length film,
This State I’m In, has been screened at numerous museums and on
Houston’s PBS affiliate). In
any case, his fruity and veggie "actors and actresses"
certainly suggest characters eager to stand center stage and sing.
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