Points of Contact

Despite the ubiquity of insects, our relationships are often founded on encounters that evoke abjection, the infiltration of our spaces, contamination of our food, puncturing of our skin. Interactions with insects are frequently defensive; we engage as victim and aggressor, slapping away at gnats, swatting at mosquitoes,stomping over ant brigades. I find that these points of contact illustrate how we view ourselves as entitled to territory, food sources, and immune to the predation of other animals. Attempts to separate insect lives from humanity have led to the saturation of our world with hazardous chemicals and the collapse of ecological networks.

In Points of Contact I have responded to the trouble in the Anthropocene by revealing intricacies of insect anatomy and fusing human and insect bodies as a manifestation of our entanglement. Using textures, traces, and fragments of insect exoskeletons and nervous systems, I offer triggering visuals in controlled exposures, restructuring the ways in which we encounter and engage with insect bodies. These fragmented sculptural forms have been exposed to commercially available pesticides, their surfaces visual anthologies for the chemical methods of control we impose upon ecological systems. The works buzz alive with bone transducers playing fragments recorded in the process of metal finishing the sculptures themselves and from insects recorded around Toronto; engaging viewers in an interspecies conversation between the vibrating limbs of arthropods and the machines of man.

I operate as a transmutationalist working with molten metal, anatomical slurry, and the liquefaction of colonial biases, asking how insect morphology can be reconfigured into a narrative framework that offers a guide to shifting cultural bias; reframing encounters with insects with the desired output of serializing bugs as vital agents in the ever-delicate living fabric of our biospheric systems, encoding the necessity of cohabitation and a reconfiguration of our perceived place within nature. I situate my material transformation as a form of metamorphosis, the works cast from recycled Iron and Bronze. The melting and re-solidification of metal is an act of imbuing human bias in material through form; I see this as a transformation of nature, and transformation of space. Framing the machine as a prosthesis, the metal components of Industrial and agricultural machinery are at a stage in their life cycle where materially they synchronize with the aspirations of industrialization. Restructuring this material through the process of casting, as insects restructure themselves within the chrysalis, allows for a reconfiguration of material intention. The earth's ore that has been refined and reduced to a point of malleability is offered an alternate manner of occupying space and given recess from its enslavement in the labor of producing capital for human consumption.

Through skeletal fragments, contorted nervous systems, and oxide prints the installation repositions insects in relation to our bodies and steps beyond collective histories of interspecies friction. Bio-surrealism becomes a lens of speculative kinship and bodies are transformed from sites of friction to systems of interdependence and joint suffering. I leverage humanist attachment to our own anatomy to challenge speciesism as well as to reveal the destructive nature of chemicals that we rely on to enforce our governance of resources and biodiversity.