Posted on Sun, Sep. 28, 2003
By ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star
New York artist Catherine Chalmers received a lot of hate mail when her photographs of cockroach executions appeared in the New York Times earlier this year.
As part of her "American Cockroach" project, Chalmers photographed and videotaped roaches being hanged, gassed, burned at the stake and electrocuted in merciless closeup. The images, admittedly, are pretty ghastly.
But what some outraged Times readers failed to note in the accompanying text was that the roach executions were simulated. In staging her productions, Chalmers takes great pains to ensure that her roach subjects are ot harmed -- in fact, her pictures are as fictitious as Hollywood movies.
"I'm more about raising things," Chalmers said during a recent interview at Grand Arts, where her exhibit, "Catherine Chalmers: American Cockroach," highlights the "Executions" segment of a three-part series she has been working on for six years.
One of the things that fascinate Chalmers is the human capacity for empathy her images elicit. Of course, people kill bugs all the time. "When you spray a home for roaches it's essentially a gas chamber," she said.
But there's something about being an up-close eye witness to the process -- which the artist drives home in an excruciating video of a roach being burned at the stake and in her black-and-white still of a cockroach bound to a tiny wood electric chair, its "wrists" and "neck" clamped with metal rings as a bolt of electricity flares above -- that makes us respond differently.
Maybe it's the human tendency to anthropomorphize a creature that has a head and "arms" and legs; maybe we intuitively sense in this work an archetype of human cruelty to humans -- a reprise of our treatment of martyrs, witches and groups deemed undesirable at various points in history.
Whatever the reason, it's all part of our "complicated relationship with the natural world" according to Chalmers, whose work is part of a wholesale re-examination of the human/nature relationship occurring in the art world, as seen locally in exhibits such as "Jean Lowe" and "Greg Rose" at the Kemper, "Unnaturally" at H&R Block Artspace and previous exhibits of Teresita Fernandez and Sam Easterson at Grand Arts.
Chalmers came to art world attention in the late 1990s with her "Food Chain" series of technicolor photographs focusing on the violence in nature endemic to survival. In narrative sequence, hornworms reduce a tomato to a gory mass of red pulp; praying mantises mate, then the female consumes the male. The murderess gets her comeuppance when she balances on the nose of a frog, then snap -- she's gone.
Chalmers, a California native who trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art in London, learned photography from a commercial photographer neighbor after settling in New York in 1985. Houseflies were her first subject, then came praying mantises, mice and frogs.
But cockroaches seemed to have limitless possibilities."The roach is a blank canvas and a loaded subject, there was more I could bring to it," she said.
"They've been around since before the dinosaurs; they can survive nuclear radiation. They started in Africa and fanned out from there as humans traveled. They are a dark shadow that follows us wherever we go."
Chalmers' New York studio is full of roaches, under control in terrariums and other inescapable containers. For the "Imposter" segment of her "American Cockroach" project, she painted the insects with bright colors and patterns and photographed them meandering about flowering plants. For the segment called "Infestations," she placed them in miniature domestic tableaux in imitation of Hollywood horror films.
Before putting these little actors through their make-up and drama sessions, Chalmers refrigerates them for a while -- the cold doesn't kill them, but immobilizes them long enough for her to arrange and shoot her photographs.
Chalmers' Grand Arts presentation includes black and white photographs of roach electrocutions, drownings and hangings and new cast resin sculptures of a 6-foot roach dangling from a noose and a pile of similarly scaled roach legs.
Two "drawings" composed of roach parts -- from a shipment that arrived dead from the biological supply company she uses -- suggest mass graves; a "mosaic" of roach wings represents the chemical structure of the main pesticide used to exterminate them. A series of tiny roach "trophy" heads, also mounted on paper, brings the big game hunt to micro level, with the little antennae standing in for antlers.
But none of these achieves the level of drama and impact encountered in the artist's three videos.
It's a medium Chalmers has only recently mastered, but to which she brings all the powers of her inventiveness and imagination. These are gripping works -- ranging in emotional tenor from tragedy to comedy to spiritual uplift.
As the flames begin to lick around the post to which the roach protagonist in "Burning at the Stake" is tied, the insect's flailing legs and jerking head are disturbing beyond measure. (It's all staged, though. Chalmers got the roach agitated by merely blowing on it and switched out the live roach for a dead one when the burning began.)
Comic relief comes from "Squish," a veritable roach modern dance set to a soundtrack of beating drums. Here Chalmers capitalizes on the insects' beauty and repulsiveness. There's a perverse charm to this performance, but you sure wouldn't want to see it in your kitchen. The screen goes dark at the end and one hears a crunching sound, as if a big foot came down instead of a stage curtain.
The third video, "Chamber," presents a "roach resurrection." Chalmers gassed the insects with dry ice, then filmed them as they slowly returned to life. The piece opens with a forest of bristly little legs in a foggy chamber and ends as the first member of the group gains his footing and trundles away.
One emerges from the darkened north gallery where the videos are screened reeling from a welter of contradictory responses. Such is Chalmers' way of imparting immediacy to our highly contradictory relationship with the natural world, where what can be hunted and what must be preserved, what is prized and what is deemed without value, is a complicated and ever-changing matter of human psychology.