WE RULE, THE DRAWING CENTER, NYC, Oct. 6, 2022 - Jan. 15, 2023 - INSTALLATION SHOTS
CATHERINE CHALMERS: WE RULE
Working at the intersection of art and science, New York-based artist Catherine Chalmers has built a multidisciplinary practice that celebrates nature and confronts humans’ often adversarial relationship with the earth. This presentation features Chalmers’s recent work alongside two site-specific installations inspired by her observation of and engagement with colonies of leafcutter ants on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.
Over a ten-year period, Chalmers returned annually to the same spot on the Costa Rican peninsula to film, photograph, and track the fate of more than a dozen leafcutter ant colonies. Not unlike a field biologist who uses the tools of science to set up experiments, collect data, and test theories, Chalmers uses art-making tools to explore and expand her connection to nature. For Chalmers, leafcutter ants are metaphors for humanity’s life on earth: they farm, communicate, and collaborate; they also colonize, battle, and destroy. Yet the drawings in We Rule highlight a significant way that the insects diverge from humans—as an integrated part of their ecosystem, the ants carry out their actions in harmony with the earth.
One of the more subtle indicators of climate change, the loss of biodiversity and insect collapse in ecosystems buried below ground in remote locales often goes unnoticed by the general public. Chalmers harnesses the narrative possibilities of drawing in an effort to bridge this rapidly increasing gap between humans and these ecosystems and to provide a lens through which we can reexamine our relationship with and impact on the natural world.
The exhibition is organized by Olga Valle Tetkowski, Deputy Director.
Catherine Chalmers: We Rule is made possible by The Drawing Center Exhibition Fund.