d berman gallery bugs out

By Jennifer Joy
Daily Texan Staff
March 29, 2001

Chalmers, recently acknowledged in Art News for her unusual subject matter, has created an international buzz in the art industry. One reason is that her subjects literally buzz! That's right, folks frogs, caterpillars, flies, roaches, praying mantises and anything that would land most people stranded on a chair or shivering with disgust, smile big for Chalmers' camera. Set against a stark white background, these creatures are the essence of her photographs.

It is true that, when smaller, insects possess a creepy, invasive quality; but once magnified, these insects are actually interesting. Chalmers invites the viewer to explore the insect's world independent from its environment, and her timing proves to be impeccable. Chalmers' dynamic compositions solely rely on an animal's reaction to a situation. A frog and preying mantis come face-to-face in an awkward, humorous display of cat and mouse. Colors explode as a bright green caterpillar winds around a cherry red tomato. But even more disturbing than watching a female preying mantis bite the head off her mate or devour a caterpillar, is the realization that the insect is conscious of its voyeuristic audience.

After seeing her book, Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators and Prey, which is also on display, I was a little disappointed by the selection of photographs for the exhibit. Some of the pieces in the book define her vision more clearly, and in truth are really funny.

Rob Ziebell, a filmmaker as well as photographer, takes a novel approach to an old subject. Fruit has long been the inspiration for many artists, but very few have exploited the characteristics of fruit with such ingenuity as Ziebell. His outrageous display of banal subject matter juxtaposed against brilliant colors and geometric patterns unite to create an odd, out of this world image.

Hovering in space, the fruit's thickly textured skin is precisely cut and sculpted. Lemons turn into swirls, orange peels spiral down the branch and a pod is split to reveal two perfectly round peas.

Although his treatment of subject matter is quite unique, the formal graphic qualities essential to art are what make his work so effective. Geometric patterning, simple lines and contrasting colors create a bold complicated explosion of materials. Ziebell charges each piece of fruit with a unique personality by emphasizing their individual characteristics.

It is no surprise that size also matters to Ziebell, but the effectiveness of the photographs relies mostly on rainbow colors and tablecloth patterning. Ziebell is the Cezanne of fruit for the 21st century.

`I'm not hurting roaches," says artist Catherine Chalmers via telephone from her parents' winter home in Sun Valley, Idaho, where she's taking a brief ski vacation before heading to Austin this week. "I put all of my energy into raising animals -- not hurting them. My job is about 90 percent zookeeping and 10 percent photography. There's really no argument for people to say that I'm doing these animals any harm. " 

You would think Chalmers, a 43-year-old New York-based photographer, is in an enviable position right now, but she's not. Not entirely, that is.  Last year, Aperture magazine published a monograph based on her "Food Chain" series of large (5 feet by 3 1/2 feet) arresting, graphic, beautiful photographs that portray animals --
tree frogs, praying mantises, tarantulas, among others that she raises in her Soho studio -- in various stages of the food chain: eating, being eaten, killing, being killed, sex. Predator and prey, life and death. The book has been doing very well. 

In recent months, her "Food Chain" series has been exhibited at the Corcoran
Museum in Washington, D.C., PS1 in New York and many other galleries in this country and in Europe. Here in Austin, her "Food Chain" photos are on view in "Two Photographers: Catherine Chalmers and Rob Ziebell" at D. Berman Gallery. 
Then last month, Art News made her and her latest project -- color photographs of roaches painted green with red florets crawling on a canopy of flowers -- the subject of its cover story. Usually that sets a buzz going about an artist's work. But then Chalmers ran into an Art News editor on the street in her neighborhood who told her that the publication had received letters from readers angry at what they perceived to be animal cruelty; some canceled their subscriptions.  
Such a response baffles Chalmers. "There is only empathy for animals on my part," she says. "You don't do what I do if you don't like them." 
Chalmers' larger-than-bug-life subjects photographed against starkly neutral backgrounds are specifically meant to pique our empathy. "I wanted the backgrounds to be neutral, nothing sentimental or natural so you could just
look at these animals afresh," she says. An interesting thing happens to the
viewer: When insects and animals are more our size -- when we can see their
faces -- they suddenly become objects of our empathy, not out hatred. 
"I'm trying to bring you into their world," says Chalmers. "I like the dichotomy
between how important insects are to the health of the planet and how much we hate them. We can have this strange kind of sympathy with other living things, yet we're the most violent species on the planet."  

Reared in Northern California, Chalmers did her undergraduate work at Stanford University, where she studied engineering and design. Then she headed to London and studied painting at the Royal College of Art. She never took a photography class. "I have no background in what I'm doing," she says. She simply picked up a friend's camera one day and took a picture of a fly. 

"I'll never enter the human world," she says. "I'm trying to deal with one
species interacting with another -- bringing out the other species' point of view.
It's essential -- it's one of the functions of art."  

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