Hungry Hyaena

Out of Office: Thai Honeymoon

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:54:00 +0000

Hungry Hyaena will be quiet this month, as my wife and I are off to Thailand for our belated honeymoon.

Hannah Addario-Berry: Brain Food/Music

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:04:00 +0000

Hannah Addario-Berry
Cello Bazaar, the cello-centric monthly music series founded and directed by BAASICS.3: The Deep End performer and presenter Hannah Addario-Berry, is named after its principal venue, Bazaar Cafe. The Richmond District coffee shop and event space is not far from Hannah's home, and Selene and I met her there on a particularly warm San Francisco morning to discuss her contribution to The Deep End program.

Hannah describes herself as "a fierce advocate of the music of today," and, like Selene and me, she is passionate about exposing a wide audience to that which she cares about; in her case, that's music and food. Along with Cello Bazaar, Hannah founded and runs Locaphonic, an organization dedicated to "connect[ing] Bay Area residents with our local musicians, food, and culinary artists, promoting sustainable livelihoods for artists and farmers and uniting our community through food and music."

I won't write much about Hannah's The Deep End performance here (it should be experienced without preconceptions), but we expect it will be a stirring representation of a mental disorder, and quite unlike any other component of program. Hannah will perform György Ligeti's "Sonata for solo cello." The first movement will open the program; the second will immediately follow intermission.

It's important that BAASICS programs are as poignant as they are informative and entertaining, and we're thrilled to have Hannah's talents and voice on board.

Image credit: courtesy, Hannah Addario-Berry

When It All Comes Together

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:07:00 +0000

Christopher Reiger
"Brewer's blackbirds"
2013

I recently promised this blog's monthly email digest subscribers that I would begin sharing updates about BAASICS (Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions), the non-profit organization that I co-founded and co-direct. Indeed, most of April's Hungry Hyaena posts are synopses of conversations had with some of the artists and scientists participating in BAASICS.3: The Deep End, our upcoming program on neurodiversities, mental illness, and creativity. (Readers can expect more of these vignettes in advance of the Monday, May 6 event.)

I've come to regard BAASICS as an important arm of my creative endeavor; it's a long-term project that provides me with a platform to help make contemporary art and science relevant and exciting to a broad audience. In many respects, BAASICS is a descendant of Synoddity, the cross-disciplinary organization I co-founded with my friend Michael McDevitt during our undergraduate years at The College of William & Mary. Synoddity made a case for conversation and interaction across professional boundaries and was, like BAASICS, animated by curiosity and wonder, something both Michael and Selene Foster, my BAASICS collaborator and co-founder, have in spades. Working on a project you're passionate about is invariably a good thing, but it's a particular pleasure when you team up with fantastic people.

Christopher Reiger
"Hood Work"
2013

Pleasant work though it may be, BAASICS is a labor of love that occupies many hours. Lest readers assume the time and energy required to nurture BAASICS has deprived my own art practice, I also promised HH digest subscribers I'd share updates about the body of work I'm beginning. The photographs that punctuate this post were all taken this year. I've been shooting a wide range of subjects in varied settings in order to hone my photography chops, which I'll need for the new work. Before I describe what the project consists of, I should provide a little backstory.

When I started Hungry Hyaena in March 2005, I wrote as many (if not more) posts about conservation, ecology, and natural history as I did art. At the same time, I was struggling in the studio, desperately trying to find a way to incorporate those interests into my artwork without producing didactic or mundane imagery. As a result, despite a number of shows and growing interest from collectors and curators, I condemned the popular series I'd been producing for several years as "self-absorbed fairy-tales," and began work on what I dubbed anthrozoology paintings, watercolors based on photographs (taken by either me or my father) of humans interacting with other animal species. A few of those works were strong -- "Ringed Seal Hunter" is a favorite of mine -- but most of the pictures in the series never met my standards; my watercolor ability was then relatively weak and I soon accepted that the imagery in the photographs was as compelling as the paintings (so why make the paintings at all!?). In 2006, I stopped working on the anthrozoology series and yet again sought to develop a series that would successfully merge my preoccupations. At last, I struck a rich vein. Some of the "Hysterical Transcendentalism" works are among the best pictures I've created to date -- "from the tangled vegetation," "the wildlings come to feed," "a retching," and "the banks of solitude" stand out -- and the quiet "drawings" I began creating as part of that series are probably the work I'm best known for. Even as that body of work developed and changed -- in some respects, I've been working on the series since 2006 -- I was haunted by the thought that it was but one facet of what I wanted to present. I've often described my artwork as pictures produced by "a naturalist working at [the] intersection" of the rational/observable and the irrational/mystical, but the work of the last six years or so has prioritized the latter.

Christopher Reiger
"Desiccated European starling"
2013

Now, I hope to straddle that divide. My new project will utilize diverse media -- photography, mixed-media painting and drawing, and collage -- to explore our relationship to the ecosystems we inhabit and to the other lifeforms we share space with. Initially, I'm going to focus on two regions, my present home, the San Francisco Bay Area, and my childhood stomping grounds, the Eastern Shore of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay. The project will focus on the field work and activities of Bay Area naturalists, conservationists, wildlife biologists, and researchers, as well as artists also wrestling with similar ideas. I will visit with, accompany, and/or work alongside individuals long and often enough to develop a sense of their motivations, their personalities, and their relationship with the landscapes and species that they interact with and/or study on a regular basis. The project will be presented as a mix of texts and pictures, both in exhibition and print, and I hope to get involved in digital publishing experimentation (e.g., Triple Canopy) so that I can devise accessible and inspiring ways of experiencing the work on a computer or tablet. Additionally, all speaking engagements, essays, and blog posts relevant to the work are, as I see it, part of the project.

Christopher Reiger
"Weeding"
2013

One branch of the project will occur this summer, in conjunction with artist Laurie Halsey Brown's Nomadic Nature In Situ seasonal project. From the project's website:

"Nomadic Nature In Situ is a seasonal project curated by senseofplace LAB, in/for the landscape. For 2013, each of the four works in this project will focus on and take place in the Presidio, San Francisco. Each piece will contribute to the development of a shared ‘language of place’. Each season, an artist or artist group will be invited to respond to a landscape/situation chosen for them by senseofplace LAB. This project is primarily an invitation for artists/architects/designers/urban planners/writers to work in response to the landscape as an experimental aspect of their practice, not just those with backgrounds working in response to the natural environment.

Beginning with the SUMMER project, Christopher Reiger will be writing about Nomadic In Situ as an observer/documenter/commentator. He will also be will be conducting a quadrat study in conjunction with the project. At different times of day (e.g., dawn, mid-day, dusk), he will regularly return to the site, each visit sitting for 2-4 hours and recording all that he observes and experiences (e.g., wind, temperature, light, other organisms, etc.). Unlike a traditional ecological survey, however, Christopher’s quadrat will also incorporate historical details and notes on his own mood and thoughts. His quadrat is principally concerned with the various forces that inform our understanding or perception of a place. The resulting document will be a traditional lab notebook filled with written observations, typed additions, drawings, photographs, and other details of his sits."

I wear many hats -- painter, writer, photographer, naturalist -- and this new body of work allows me to wear them all at once. I wish I could express how good that feels, but an emoticon will have to suffice. :)

Christopher Reiger
"Little Bighorn"
2013

Image credit: all images, Christopher Reiger, 2013

Leeza Doreian & Creativity Explored

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:57:00 +0000

Leeza Doreian at work in her West Oakland studio
A few weeks ago, Selene and I met BAASICS.3: The Deep End presenter Leeza Doreian at her home in West Oakland. She and her partner, John, an artist, furniture maker, and contractor, have lived in the house for three years, and are remodeling it in their limited spare time. Shortly after moving to the Bay Area from Brooklyn five years ago, Leeza began working at Creativity Explored, a Mission-based non-profit organization dedicated to "provid[ing] artists with developmental disabilities the means to create, exhibit, and sell their art."

We sat around Leeza's dining room table, chatting, admiring reproductions of artwork, and sipping coffee in a brightly lit room that opens to her backyard; the liquid warble of a House finch punctuated our conversation. Leeza suggested that Creativity Explored and similar organizations -- Creativity Explored, Creative Growth, and NIAD Art Center are all Bay Area organizations dedicated to working with artists with developmental and/or physical disabilities, and all three were founded by Florence and Elias Katz -- aim to help people "access their own abilities."

Leeza described the role of the teaching artist, her official title at the organization, as that of a facilitator. It's not art therapy, she insisted, but "it happens to be therapeutic." One gets the sense this salubrious effect is a two-way street, benefiting both the Creativity Explored studio artists and the teaching artists. Leeza described how freeing she finds the Creativity Explored environment because most people exhibit a healthy lack of self-consciousness, staff included. "I'm generally a shy person," she told us, "but not there."

Please join us on May 6 for Leeza's presentation, "Con-Currents: Creativity, Individuality, and Community." Leeza will share with the audience an overview of a typical day at Creativity Explored, and then showcase the work of five or six studio artists.

Image credit: courtesy Leeza Doreian

Dr. Walter Freeman III's chaos and creativity

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:19:00 +0000

Dr. Walter J. Freeman

"One profound advantage chaos may confer on the brain is that chaotic systems continually produce novel activity patterns. We propose that such patterns are crucial to the development of nerve cell assemblies that differ from established assemblies. More generally, the ability to create activity patterns may underlie the brain's ability to generate insight and the 'trials' of trial-and-error problem solving."
- Walter J. Freeman

On a sunny Tuesday morning when most of the University of California, Berkeley student body was away from campus for Spring Break, Selene and I had the pleasure of visiting Dr. Walter Freeman in his Donner Lab office. He provided us with a simple introduction to neurodynamics -- brain waves are a "special kind of noise," he explained -- before expounding on the theoretical outgrowth of his neuroscience research. Many of Walter's conclusions about the workings of the brain have an unexpected antecedent, the philosophy of the 13th century theologian, St. Thomas of Aquinas (Walter prefers the Italian formulation, Tommaso, so I will use it here).

Thomism, Tommaso's philosophy, postulates that individual choice is foundational to the action and development of the mind. Although Walter was quick to point out that "free will" is something of a misnomer -- since all choices are constrained by reality and informed by multitudinous factors -- he explained that Thomism posits that the mind is supplied with information through observation and that the individual then takes action based on the information received. In Tommaso's lexicon, we derive such information from the "phantasm," an external sensory stimulus. How the received information is processed and acted upon, however, varies widely. Tommaso writes that "the received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver." Whatever action results, that very act supplies new information to the brain (through observation and experience), and the brain accommodates accordingly.

Wikipedia helpfully informed me that "Thomas's epistemological theory would later be classified as empiricism, for holding that sensations are a necessary step in acquiring knowledge, and that deductions cannot be made from pure reason." This element of the irrational becomes especially important when we move away from more routine mentation. What happens when life only gives you lemons...really dreadful lemons? Then, Walter says, it must be "creativity all the way." Unpredictable and extreme situations give rise to a different kind of accommodation.

As an example, Walter told us about a curious, last-ditch evasion technique employed by some moth species when pursued by a bat. If a moth's primary and secondary evasion strategies, adaptations and behaviors intended to allow the moth to avoid sonar detection altogether, fail and the insect realizes a bat is "locked on" for the kill, the moth will fold its wings and tumble from the sky. How well does this surprising maneuver work? Walter couldn't say (and, frustratingly, I haven't been able to hunt down data online), but the technique's efficacy is less interesting to Walter than the moth brain's creative solution. The brain is accommodating itself to an untenable situation not by giving up, but by trying something unexpected, unpredictable.

And so it is with all brains; chaos in that organ endows us with the ability to respond flexibly to the outside world and to generate novel ideas…whether when running from a tiger or painting a picture. As part of BAASICS.3: The Deep End, Walter will present "Persevere or perseverate? How brain chaos surmounts our daily challenges."

Image credit: photo ripped from Machines Like Us website

Dr. Indre Viskontas and the reshuffled brain

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 05:18:00 +0000

Dr. Indre Viskontas with the the "Painted Ladies"
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I met Dr. Indre Viskontas for coffee in the Fillmore District. Although Indre's BAASICS.3: The Deep End presentation, "Release from Inhibition: The creative impulse in patients with dementia," draws primarily on her neuroscience research experience, she is a scientist and an artist. She earned a PhD from UCLA as well as a Master of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she now serves on the faculty.

In the course of our conversation, we learned how Indre's experiences as co-host of OWN's Miracle Detectives buttressed her commitment to secular humanism, and about several exciting art and music projects she's currently working on. Mostly, though, we learned about the research Indre did into the workings of creativity in patients with frontotemporal dementia.

As Indre put it, "the brain doesn't break." Instead, it "reshuffles," and in many cases that reshuffling results in the loss of one or several skills/abilities -- word comprehension or impulse control, for example -- yet will "enable [the patients] to be better at something" else. Indre stressed that each patient is distinct, but that similarities across the patient body suggest some universal effects; she'll present her findings on May 6.

Indre is also invested in making science accessible to the general public, and Selene and I will be closely following her work going forward.

Image credit: photo from Indre Viskontas' website

Seeing Through the Story

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:09:00 +0000

Six paintings of cats by Louis Wain, shown as a group to illustrate their increasingly abstract and electric nature, attributed to his suffering from schizophrenia
When I was eighteen, I had a passionate argument with my father about my life's priorities. I insisted that producing good art mattered above all else. Because I was a teenager who still boiled down everything to causative choices, I declared that I would happily die destitute if doing so meant I'd produce a few revelatory works in my lifetime. My father angrily dismissed my stance as romantic and foolish, but I held my ground (as is the wont of eighteen-year-old ideologues), and proclaimed that I'd sooner kill myself than create artwork for money or popular acclaim.

I've forgiven my teenage self his ridiculous pretension. He was just reflecting the prevalent narrative of the tortured artist, of the mad or misunderstood genius, and I appreciate the appeal of that account; we're storytelling animals. Unfortunately, we too often allow a compelling tale about an artist to trump our experience of the artwork he or she produced. We struggle to look at a painting by Henry Darger, Louis Wain, or Vincent van Gogh without foregrounding the artists' biographies, and the same is true of our dead-at-27 rock n' roll heroes.

This double-edged contextualization of artwork will be touched on in the course of BAASICS.3: The Deep End, albeit with a special focus on "outsider" or "visionary" artwork and the artists producing it.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Help Make BAASICS.3: The Deep End Possible

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:46:00 +0000

In 2011, I co-founded BAASICS (Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions), a series of San Francisco-based evening programs that brings together artists, scientists, and interdisciplinary thinkers to present engaging multi-media lectures and performances. Each BAASICS program is built around a particular theme, with participants given the green light to express their brilliance and share their passions in ways that don't always involve a Powerpoint presentation and a microphone. All BAASICS programs are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. We aim to make the contemporary arts and sciences more accessible and less esoteric, thereby inspiring guests to think about how the two spheres relate to one another and to society at large. To date, we've put on two successful programs, BAASICS.1: A Live Animal (July 2011) and BAASICS.2: The Future (June 2012). Our third program, BAASICS.3: The Deep End, will take place at the ODC Theater on May 6, 2013.

We're currently awaiting word from the IRS about official 501(c)3 non-profit status. That designation will allow us to apply for large grants (the non-sequestered ones, anyway!) and to take the first steps toward budgetary sustainability. In the meantime, the funding for these free programs comes from small grants (which supported the second program), in-kind donations, and contributions from individuals and Bay Area businesses. With the money we've scraped together and help from a lot of good-hearted people, we've made exciting things happen on a shoe-string budget...but BAASICS remains a labor of (art-science crossover) love and optimism, and we still need your help to make these events happen.

We recently launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign, and I'll be grateful for any Hungry Hyaena readers that can help out. Every little bit helps; no amount is too small. If you're unable to pledge, spreading the word is moral support, and I'd love it if you'd share the campaign with your scientist and artist friends -- heck, with anyone, anywhere!

For more information, visit our Kickstarter page or our main website.

Announcing "Imaginatio(n)ow" Exhibition

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:12:00 +0000

I'm pleased to announce that one of my mixed media paintings is included in "Imaginatio(n)ow," an exhibition curated by artist and curator Christina You-sun Park in conjunction with Arizona State University's Institute for Humanities Research. I've included the text of the press release below. If any Hungry Hyaena readers are near Tempe, Arizona, please check out the exhibition!

"Imaginatio(n)ow" runs from February 8 - April 26, 2013. More information can be found here.

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"The concepts of imagination and the imaginary are of particular interest to scholars in the humanities as the imagination can be a double-edged sword. Myth, metaphor, and narrative can empower sound ethical decision-making, resuscitate our humanity when we falter, enliven forgiveness, love, and hope in the human heart, and engender powerful visions that create better lives. Yet, imagination may also condemn humanity to irrational delusions, apocalyptic visions, prophetic fascination with dark endings, and unethical imaginary motifs and practices.

The featured artwork addresses the immediacy of the imagination\imaginary; how the artist uses imagination not only as a source of inspiration, but also as a method for mentally and visually processing our constantly changing world; and how the human imagination allows us to transform reality or liberate the ways we think, feel, and experience our lives."

"Private Frontiers" at Hosfelt Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 19:11:00 +0000

Michael Light
"Lake Las Vegas 2010-2012 20. 'Casa Palermo' Lake Las Vegas Homes Looking Southwest, Henderson, Nevada"
2010
Pigment print mounted on aluminum
40 x 50 inches
Edition of 5
I recently visited Hosfelt Gallery's impressive new space, currently home to "Private Frontiers," a two person show featuring works by Brooklyn-based painter Chris Ballantyne and San Francisco-based photographer Michael Light. According to the press release, the two artists "have been in dialogue for the past year to develop work that examines the human urge to stake territory and its more absurd manifestations on the American landscape." Whatever the specifics of the artists' conversation, Ballantyne's paintings are a terrific compliment to Light's large-format aerial photographs. Exhibited on their own in the expansive Hosfelt loft, Ballantyne's colorful and occasionally whimsical works would risk being swallowed up as bittersweet morsels. Hanging alongside Light's grand photographs, though, Ballantyne's modestly-sized pictures comport themselves especially well; their affability and humor endure, but undercurrents of earnestness and melancholy, too easily missed if exhibited on their own in so airy a space, are amply felt.

Chris Ballantyne
"Not a Thru Street"
2011
Acrylic on panel
12 x 16 inches
Likewise, in the company of Ballantyne's works, the wry humor and conceptual nuance of Light's photographs is made more perceptible. From Light's perch (a lightweight, high-winged, and doorless airplane that he pilots), the interventions of mankind on the landscape appear at once less and more offensive, a result of the shift in perspective and scale. These are complicated, awesome pictures, imposing, yet understated enough to invite a multiplicity of readings.

Michael Light
"Lake Las Vegas 2010-2012 14. Future Homesites of 'The Falls' at Lake Las Vegas, Henderson, Nevada"
2011
Pigment print mounted on aluminum
40 x 50 inches
Edition of 5
The terraced Nevada desert landscape pictured in "Lake Las Vegas 2010-2012 14. Future Homesites of 'The Falls' at Lake Las Vegas, Henderson, Nevada" might be mistaken for an ancient, ziggurat-like structure, excavated by archeologists. It could also be an ambitious new Earthwork undertaken by the likes of Michael Heizer. In actuality, as the picture's title reveals, it is an unfinished residential development project. Knowing this, we're liable to shrink from the photograph, filled with righteous indignation about our species' profligacy and environmental thoughtlessness. Even as we do so, it's worth noting that we'd almost certainly react differently were we looking at a photo of an archeological site or contemporary Earthwork heroics.

Michael Light
"Future 'Highland Vista Age-Qualified Master Planned Community' Homes by RFMS Looking Southeast, Mesquite, Nevada; 2010"
2010
Pigment print mounted on aluminum
59 x 74 inches
Edition of 2
In "Future 'Highland Vista Age-Qualified Master Planned Community' Homes by RFMS Looking Southeast, Mesquite, Nevada; 2010," we look down on unfinished roads to nowhere, a stark hieryglyph on the desert surface. The photograph is as aesthetically compelling as its subject is ludicrous. In another of Light's pictures, we see an absurd mirage, a relatively verdant luxury development abutting sun-faded desert mountains. The developers named this gated luxury living community "Casa Palermo," after the Sicilian seaside city. We rightly shake our heads at the environmental irresponsibility (and lugubrious name) of such a venture, but when we contemplate "Casa Palermo" in the context of geologic time, considering the action of tectonics and climate over millennia, we might, for a moment, view the gated community as representative of our species' tenuous prospect.

Indeed, as I wrote of Light's work in 2007, the photographs "encourage us to question conventional notions of natural and artificial, and also to consider these environments with respect to the full sweep of time and scale." Spend enough time in a gallery filled with Light's photographs and book works, and the pictured developments and mines will begin to call to mind tissue slices or cell cross-sections. The forms and processes never seem benign, and sometimes -- too often -- appear malignant, but they highlight the vain futility of mere value judgments. Light's work reminds us that it's too easy (even dangerous) to label humanity a cancer and throw up our hands; the responsible thing is to regulate -- to direct and control -- the ontogenesis, and to understand that it is, itself, a natural phenomenon.

Michael Light
"Edge of the Black Thunder Coal Mine, 9% of American Supply, Wright, WY"
2007
Pigment print mounted on aluminum
40 x 50 inches
Edition of 5

Chris Ballantyne
"Pass Through"
2011
Acrylic on panel
12 x 16 inches

Image credit: all images, courtesy the artists and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

A Rainbow at Milestone 35

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 18:48:00 +0000

On January 1, 2008, five years ago tomorrow, I posted "A(nother) New Year," a short meditation on my 30th birthday and the passage of time. The piece closes with the following paragraph.

"It's a rare, curious thing when one's perception of life transitions from the regular line of past, present, and future to an ambiguous cycle of individual moments. This mode is necessarily fleeting, so difficult is it to reconcile with contemporary life. We flip through scrapbooks and retell stories of our youth; the ball drops, the clock counts down and the crowd's vague, anticipatory energy crescendos; a mark is made, the number changed; the owl falls on the quivering chaff. Ring in the year of the brown rat. I'll also ring in another decade."

This past Saturday, I rang in another half-decade, turning 35. On my 30th birthday, I noted that I was "another year older, but more happy than I've been in years." That was a little over a month before my first date with the beautiful and wonderful woman who, this past November, I married; she is no small part of why my life, five years later, is happier still.

Whether the happiness is causative or not, I can't say, but, today, although I remain inspired and moved by subjects that many people shy from (the "deer carcass dumped in a roadside ditch" that I photographed on my 30th birthday, for example), I'm also open to many that I used to deride. And so, as 2012 turns over into 2013, as the black dragon morphs into the water snake, I share with HH readers a rainbow over San Francisco's Mission District.

Mission Sunset rainbow;San Francisco, CA; September 2012
Happy 2013, folks. May it be a productive and deeply satisfying year.

Image credit: Christopher Reiger, copyright 2012

Heide Hatry's Provocative Flowers

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:53:00 +0000

Heide Hatry is not a household name, but the New York-based German artist's reputation is blossoming. She has smartly positioned herself at the intersection of the art world and popular culture and, as a result, is of particular interest to me, convinced as I am that the fine arts need mass reach (if not necessarily mass appeal -- see Thomas Kinkade) in order to play the vital cultural role they're intended to.

Heide Hatry, right, with Paris Hilton at the Guggenheim Museum
In September, Hatry performed "Schrodinger's Cat" at Lady Gaga's Guggenheim Museum perfume launch. Although Gaga's arty public appearances and carefully cultivated persona evidence how readily pop culture co-opts and/or draws inspiration from the fine arts, most people view Gaga as a pop star, not an artist. Hatry, on the other hand, is always identified as the latter, so when she is photographed rubbing shoulders with the likes of Paris Hilton or her work is written about by the scientist and popular writer Steven Pinker, I'm heartened. The art world isn't usually so accessible.

Naysayers might dismiss Hatry as the art world equivalent of a shock jock, insisting the popular attention she has received is only the result of her pushing our buttons. Certainly provocation plays a part, but Hatry has so far managed to balance titillation with thoughtful questions. (Arguably, Damien Hirst managed to do the same for a time...before he jumped the preserved shark.)

Heide Hatry
"Organa aurantiaca locustarum, Boston, MA"
2011
Color photograph of site-specific sculpture
Given Hatry's knack for the tight rope walk between art world respect and popular acclaim, she's an artist to watch. That being so, I'm very pleased to have contributed a short essay to her most recent book project, Not A Rose. From the publisher:

"Masked as a traditional coffee table book, Not A Rose quotes from the genre while turning it inside out, for the images it offers are not innocent, pretty flowers but elegant, compelling, yet grotesque sculptures that the artist has created from the offal, sex organs, and other parts of animals, reminding us that the flowers that grace our homes are really the detached dead sex organs of living beings, and making us question the foundations of aesthetic reception in general. Woven through the images, and taking its cue from them, is the writing of 101 prominent intellectuals, writers, and artists (such as Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Safran Foer, Donna Haraway, Lucy Lippard, Rick Moody, Avital Ronell, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, and Franz Wright...) who address 'the question of the flower' from a multiplicity of perspectives, including anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, philology, botany, neuroscience, art history, gender studies, physics, and chemistry."

Below, I've posted my Not A Rose contribution. The book made its North American debut earlier this month, and you can order a copy of the handsome monograph here.

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Heide Hatry
"Lolligunculae aridae, pars concae, Beijing, China"
2011
Color photograph of site-specific sculpture
"Exchange & Conversion"

My childhood fascination with and fondness for animals was keen, but I gave little consideration to plant life. The flowers and vegetable plants in my mother’s garden were only platforms on which to catch butterflies, bees, wasps, caterpillars, and the occasional praying mantis. The lespedeza hedgerows that paralleled the roads of our coastal Virginia farm provided habitat for rabbits and songbirds, and the pine stands were excellent places to turn up box turtles and black rat snakes. In my mind’s eye, animals were the players; plants and trees were the backdrop. My father, a writer and naturalist, attempted to broaden my ecological understanding. He taught me about the trees and plants that populated the farm, but I mostly ignored this information. It simply didn't interest me.

It wasn’t until I’d become a city-dwelling adult that I developed an appreciation for the plant kingdom. I grew fond of the pothos, lilies, sansevieria, and other common houseplants that I nurtured in my Queens apartment. Occasionally, during watering or pruning sessions, I would talk to them. I was well aware of how silly this behavior would appear to another person, but I excused my anthropomorphism as an acceptable byproduct of empathy; I was the plants’ steward, after all, and chit-chat with those in our care is perfectly appropriate.

Heide Hatry
"Aures porcorum, Harlem, NYC"
2011
Color photograph of site-specific sculpture
In time, however, I discovered that there are better justifications for talking to plants. Human speech requires the exhalation of carbon dioxide, the gas that plants transmute into food (via photosynthesis). Therefore, my plant talk can be rationalized as another kind of feeding. Likewise, because photosynthesis produces oxygen, the gas that we humans breathe, my houseplants and I are a microcosm of the oxygen cycle, an object lesson in the interdependence of all life forms.

But my speech is not only CO2. It is also energy directed at the plant with intention, a tacit acknowledgement of my distinct relationship to another organism. This is no mean thing. The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead wrote of “the immanent sociality of experience,” insisting that all identity and experience is a result of relationship. We define not just who we are, but also what we are, in relation to the rest of it.

Should that strike one as too ethereal a notion, consider coevolution. 100 million years ago, when angiosperms exploded onto the ecological scene, profound evolutionary forces began shaping bees, hummingbirds, and bats, the angiosperms’ pollinators. Concurrently, the physiology of the plants was modified in response to the species they depended upon for pollination. The Spathiphyllum flower in my kitchen is only the latest manifestation of a species that has been metamorphosing for millions of years in collaboration with other organisms and environments. The story of flowers is a story about relationship because every life story is; experience is immanently reciprocal and form is intrinsically dynamic.

Heide Hatry
"Becci gallinarum inferiores, fibrae pinnarum ceti, Hong Kong, China"
2011
Color photograph of site-specific sculpture
Over millennia, our own species’ exceptional consciousness evolved from sensate, but morally blind matter. This account makes us uncomfortable; we don’t like to think of ourselves as animals shaped by the vicissitudes of time. But I'm awed – humbled, truly – by the stretch and striving of being. Life is restless. The eloquent naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote of life’s “eternal dissatisfaction with what it is, its persistent habit of reaching out into new environments and, by degrees, adapting itself to the most fantastic circumstances.” I marvel at the seductive shape and alluring colors of a flower and the aggregation of flesh, bone, chemicals, and microorganisms that are the human body.

I also think of life’s “eternal dissatisfaction with what it is” when I survey images of Hatry’s flesh flowers. At once beautiful and grotesque, these still lifes are convincing cousins to the carrion or corpse flowers, but her creations are assembled of the leftover, less desirable body parts and organs of the species that carnivorous humans consume. Hatry’s decision to use material that Westerners usually eschew – because, among other reasons, it reminds us of our base antecedence – to craft beautiful forms is subtly provocative, goading us to wrestle with ontological questions that, like the discarded meat the artist works with, we prefer to neglect. We should not be given a pass.

Heide Hatry
"Spisulae solidissimae, cilia cervorum, oesophagus capreae, Cervi, Dallas, TX"
2011
Color photograph of site-specific sculpture
Image credits: Photo of Paris Hilton and Heide Hatry by Steven K., ripped from Huffington Post; all flower photographs, copyright Heide Hatry, 2011, posted with the permission of the artist

The Mystics Downtown

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:38:00 +0000

Due to time constraints, I've provided only brief remarks about three terrific, tangentially related downtown shows. All three are on view for just one more day, so rush out to see them, if you can.

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"Uncharted," a handsome group show of works on paper at Cain Schulte Gallery, "explore[s] the concept of mapping as the visual and conceptual categorization and organization of relationships, systems, and interactions." Remarkably, the works included in "Uncharted" all relate well to one another (rare for a group show with such a broad theme), and the exhibition is compelling both visually and conceptually, but a few artists' contributions stand out.

Owen Schuh
"Two Folds"
2012
Graphite, gold copper and silver leaf, and sumi ink on paper
32 x 32 inches
Owen Schuh's "Two Folds" is an elegant diagram illustrating all of the possible ways a piece of paper can be folded in two. Schuh is a precise craftsman, and his circles and lines add up to a kind of mathematical sublime. Without the aid of the press release, I wouldn't have recognized what it is that Schuh has mapped, but that isn't necessarily a problem. "Two Folds" also works as an arcane design, calling to mind the complicated but specific hierarchies of, say, a Kabbalist. That Schuh has produced an image that is as readily associated with mathematics as it is esoteric mysticism shouldn't surprise; just ask your neighborhood theoretical astrophysicist to discuss notions of beauty.

Amber Stucke
"Survival Relationships No. 2 (Symbiosis State)"
2011
Graphite, gouache, and ink on stonehenge paper
50 x 38 inches
Amber Stucke's two large drawings, "Survival Relationships [Symbiosis State]," Numbers 1 and 2, inspire a similar sense of wonder, but, unlike Schuh's more abstract and Apollonian investigation, Stucke's subjects are bulbous and oozy, lacking right angles and hard lines. Her project focuses on the curious and often complex relationships of simple organisms. Her richly detailed work elicits obvious comparison to the celebrated German biologist and artist, Ernst Haeckel (whose intricate prints are collected in Art Forms Of Nature, a book that regularly appears in artists' libraries), but whereas most contemporary works that manifest Haeckel's influence are relatively feeble, Stucke's drawings delight every bit as much as those of the famous naturalist. Moreover, as Stucke's works' titles suggest, she is less concerned with the biological forms per se than she is in their interaction.

Katie Holten
"Shadow Drawing"
2012
Graphite on paper
9 x 12 inches
Katie Holten's shadow drawing series is less visually exciting than the aforementioned works by Schuh or Stucke, but her small pictures, artifacts of her mapping the movement of shadows in a given space, are restrained reminders of the value of taking note of that which typically goes unnoticed.

Charles Burchfield
"White Picket Fence"
c. 1965
Watercolor, chalk, and charcoal on joined paper
53 x 40 inches
A block south, at the Fraenkel Gallery, works by another perceptive observer of the everyday are on view. The title of Charles Burchfield's "White Picket Fence" evokes bourgeois banality, but the striking picture makes it plain that Burchfield was a modern mystic, an artist who saw (or recognized) the extraordinary in the mundane.

In the painting, just beyond the eponymous fence (which is positioned at the base of the image, its wooden slats between us and Burchfield's vision), a tree heaves heavenward like a pyre, radiant with heat and light. Admiring the piece, I thought of the biblical story of Moses and the divine revelation he experienced in the form of a burning bush. According to one popular interpretation of the story, Moses broke with the mundane when he choose to observe the ordinary world (the bush) through extraordinary eyes (the bush as burning). Revelation, in this reading, is experienced by those who are willing to truly open themselves to the wonder of this world. Similarly, Burchfield observed that "the artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there."

Charles Burchfield
"Heat Lightning (Landscape with Grey Clouds)"
c. 1962
Watercolor, charcoal, and white chalk on joined paper
58 x 45 inches
Consider the artist's "Heat Lightning (Landscape with Grey Clouds)," also included in the Fraenkel Gallery exhibition. The painting possesses a hallucinatory grandeur that reminds us why our ancestors felt compelled to populate the sky with god-driven chariots and angelic hordes, but Burchfield's beaming cloud towers and oxbow channels are the raw stuff of myth, the awe-inspiring inspiration sans any fantasy spawn. Myth is vital to our species, but Burchfield's work reminds us that the unadulterated real, if looked at with keen eyes, is itself astonishing.

Critic Jerry Saltz described Burchfield as "the mystic, cryptic painter of transcendental landscapes," but it's important to remember that, like his American transcendentalist predecessors, Burchfield's work is merely an enthusiastic response to the world as it is; mystics are not lunatics.

Chris Fraser
“Eidolon, Sylvania 120PAR/CAP/SPL/FL30, 2012”
2012
Light Installation
Exterior View
Just around the corner from Fraenkel, at Highlight Gallery, a contemporary transcendentalist is exhibiting. Unlike Burchfield, Chris Fraser is not a painter -- nor is he a poet like Walt Whitman, whose "Eidolons" provides the title of Fraser's solo show -- but his work reveals for us "not what [we see] in nature, but what is there."

Fraser's background in photography led him to work with light as a primary medium. All of the artist's recent projects play with our perception of light's movement through space; in the process, Fraser, makes the ethereal almost tangible. "Eidolon, Sylvania 120PAR/CAP/SPL/FL30, 2012," the strongest work in "Eidolons," is also among the most beautiful of Fraser's pieces to date. Fraser's artwork titles ground his project in the mundane (the letters and numbers are the manufacturer code information associated with the bulbs Fraser uses), but by directing the bulb's illumination through a tiny hole in a wall (and into an otherwise unlit room), Fraser focuses our attention on the astonishingly intricate pattern cast by the ordinary flood light. The effect is transformative.

Alone in the dark interior space with the floating impression of the bulb's face projected in front of me, I move between scales, alternately considering the subtly pulsing pattern in front of me as a particle accelerator collision, a sunflower's floret pattern, and a representation of the cosmos. Highlight Gallery's press release defines an eidolon as "a phantom or an image of the ideal." In combination, those two things -- a phantom and the ideal -- flow into the notion of the numinous, and I believe that is Fraser's aim, to provide his viewers with experiences that might open them to awe.

Chris Fraser
“Eidolon, Sylvania 120PAR/CAP/SPL/FL30, 2012”
2012
Light Installation
Interior View

Image credits: Owen Schuh, Amber Stucke, and Katie Holten images, courtesy the artists and Cain Schulte Gallery; Charles Burchfield images, courtesy the Fraenkel Gallery; Chris Fraser images, courtesy the artist and Highlight Gallery

Announcing "Animalier" Exhibition

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:37:00 +0000

I'm pleased to announce that two of my watercolor drawings are included in "Animalier: The Animal in Contemporary Art," an exhibition put on by Northwestern Oklahoma State University.

While I know most of Hungry Hyaena's readership resides on the US coasts, if you happen to find yourself near Alva, Oklahoma, in November, please check out the exhibition!

David Tomb's "Grand Birds"

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 17:30:00 +0000

David Tomb
"Azure-breasted Pitta"
2012
Painted papers with mixed media and partially pasted and or completely pasted on paper with mixed media
42 x 30 inches

"Grand Birds of the Philippines," David Tomb's current solo show at Electric Works, is deserving of a thoughtful review. Disappointingly, my writing time is limited this month and I can provide only a few observations.

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David Tomb
"Mindanao Wattled Broadbill and Swift"
2012
Painted papers with mixed media and partially pasted and or completely pasted on paper with mixed media
42 x 30 inches

Birds have been the principal protagonists of David Tomb's colorful watercolor and gouache paintings for the last six or seven years, but "Grand Birds of the Philippines" sees the artist pushing the construction of his works in exciting ways. Tomb builds the new pictures by pinning and pasting select fragments of various paintings and drawings onto larger paper grounds or directly onto the gallery walls. Viewers will spot numerous pin holes in the exhibited assemblages, evidence of earlier permutations; an orchid was moved to a different branch, perhaps, or a swift's dark silouhette adjusted so that it chases another gnat. Here and there, a vine or butterfly wing is left unfixed, protruding from the picture's surface and lending a sculptural effect to the work.

Tomb's approach, which calls to mind Judy Pfaff's "sculptural painting," is a surprisingly effective technique for a wildlife artist (or, more accurately in the case of Tomb, a contemporary artist working at the fringe of that genre). The assemblages have a playful and provisional feel to them that is satisfyingly fresh, but the technique also heightens the sense of space and, in some of the works on display (most notably, the show's pièce de résistance, "Great Philippine Eagles") supplies a verisimilitude normally lacking in natural history art and illustration. As in the field, our eyes dart around the impressive image, and the 3-dimensional elements cause the lenses of our predatory eyes to subtly flex and relax, bringing different subjects or areas into focus. Tomb smartly exaggerates this effect by painting soft watercolor wash backgrounds that fall suddenly away where they come up against a pinned down hard edge.

David Tomb
"Great Philippine Eagles"
2012
Painted papers with mixed media pinned to wall surface
130 x 180 inches

Of the smaller works in "Grand Birds," "Azure-breasted Pitta" and "Mindanao Wattled Broadbill and Swift" are the most compositionally engaging and successful, but this writer, a bird and snake nut, also reserves a special place for Tomb's exuberant "Mindanao Hornbill, Wagler's Pit-Viper, and Collared Kingfisher."

If David Tomb's work appeals to you but, like me, you're operating on a lean budget, you can support the artist's conservation non-profit, Jeepney Projects, by purchasing benefit prints and, in a few weeks, note cards on the Jeepney website store. 100% of the print and card sales proceeds support bird conservation efforts in Mexico and the Philippines.

David Tomb
"Mindanao Hornbill, Wagler's Pit-Viper, and Collared Kingfisher"
2012
Painted papers with mixed media and partially pasted or completely pasted on paper with mixed media
42 x 30 inches

Image credits: copyright, David Tomb, 2012; courtesy David Tomb and Electric Works

Picturing Awe

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 17:25:00 +0000

Frame from "Wind Map"
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas
Last night, I attended the second presentation in this season's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium series at UC Berkeley. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, artists and researchers who often work as a team, presented "Visualization and the Joy of Revelation," an engaging survey of their greatest hits (to date) supplemented by tidbits about their process and working philosophy.

From the ATC listing:

"Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg explore the joy of revelation: the special electricity of seeing a city from the air, of hearing a secret, of watching a lover undress. Their medium is data visualization, a technology developed by computer scientists to extract insights from raw numbers. They'll show what happens when this technology is aimed at data sets that range from tropical storms to social networks, from arguments on Wikipedia to expressions of carnal desire."

As Wattenberg and Viegas showcased some of their work -- "Fleshmap" and "Wind Map" are perhaps the best known of their collaborations -- I found myself thinking about one of the books I'm currently reading, astrophysicist Adam Frank's The Constant Fire. In the book, Frank critiques the current relationship (or lack thereof) between science and religion, arguing that the spiritual impulse is at the root of both religion and science (i.e., that religion is a kind of proto-science). Riding BART to Berkeley from San Francisco, I was struck by the passage below and Wattenberg and Viegas' presentation called it to mind.

"Science […] makes life's sacred character apparent to us. Science creates hierophanies through the act of careful observation and consideration. Science makes even the smallest thing - the gnat, the flea, the dust mote - sacred. This transformation comes about when the observer cares enough to notice the world's details. The experience […] comes in the moment when we encounter a new image or recognize the key patterm in a new dataset. It comes whenever the patheways of science make the world stand out, illuminated and luminous. […] It is a result of an encounter with the world when it is allowed to speak for itself. In hearing its voice we see the world as new and worthy of awe. […] If, as a culture, we do not identify this moment as an encounter with the world's sacred character, as a hierophany, it is because we have been taught not to. Instead we call it 'amazement,' 'wonder,' or simply 'awe.' We should not be fooled. Rudolf Otto would not be fooled. In The Idea of the Holy he named 'awe' as nothing less than the principal experience of the numinous."

Wattenberg and Viegas exhibit a curiosity and enthusiasm (it's worth exploring the etymology of the second word) that is shared by many of the strongest artists, scientists, and thinkers. All the ink spilled about the intersection of art and science notwithstanding, the seed from which both sprout is watered by amazement, wonder, and awe. Individually, most of us prefer to experience those emotions in either a sacred or a profane arena, but Frank's point is that the arenas themselves are constructions; in this respect, sacred and profane are functionally the same.

The projects Wattenberg and Viegas have created hammer that point home. Explore some of them below.

The Wind Map

Fleshmap
(For a good chuckle, visit the musical genres breakdown of this project.)

Flickr Flow

History Flow

Frame from "Flickr Flow"
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas
Image credits: both images ripped from Martin Wattenberg's website, visualizations by Wattenberg and Viegas

In good company (and family)

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:36:00 +0000

Egon Schiele
"Woman Crouching"
1918
In a post that appeared here in August 2005, I touched on my longtime love of Egon Schiele's paintings and drawings. I wrote,

"[In my teens, as] I learned more about the work of twentieth century art world luminaries, I came to love the paintings of Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, and Francis Bacon. My attraction to these three artists should have come as no surprise, but it would be several years before I realized what these three painters share: a bold, graphic approach to contour and color. They are illustrators' painters every bit as much as they are painters' painters; their work points to the absurdity of the distinction."

I still adore Schiele's figures and landscapes. Although I no longer refer to him as my favorite artist, he remains a major figure in my pantheon.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered this morning that Alice Jones, a young artist in New Zealand, cites Schiele and me as her favorite artists in a video Q&A she posted to her blog. (Thanks for the nod, Alice! I'm thrilled that my pictures speak to you.)

Sometimes, working in relative obscurity and lorded over by self-doubt, I find myself wondering how so many artists march on (to the beat of their little drum) despite professional uncertainty and risk. But when, every now and again, you're reminded that your work is inspiring other artists and finding an audience in places you've never even visited...the challenges of a career in the arts are chased back into the shadows, still present, but a little less daunting. (Thank you for that, too, Alice.)

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Tangentially-related -- because it is both inspiring and New Zealand-based -- is this short television magazine human interest piece about my Uncle Tony, who moved to New Zealand from Alaska, purchased a "mudhole" in Southland, and over the course of ten years restored it to a healthy wetland. From a print article about the project,

"Big Lagoon's destruction was not unique, Mr Reiger said. 'It was a casualty of an ongoing war from industry, farming, and other factors against wetlands all across New Zealand,' he said. Today, surrounded on three sides by dairy farms, Big Lagoon provides a safe and natural habitat for nearly 70 bird species and supports a healthy population of short-finned eels. The wetland is also a testament to nearly a decade of hard work from someone who wanted to give something back to his adopted homeland. 'My effort was as much for the habitat and the wildlife the lagoon brought with it but for the people of Southland,' he said."

It's clear that a passion for conservation runs in Reiger blood, with my father and both of his brothers dedicating substantial effort and resources to conservation projects and me, in my sidelong way, trying to contribute to conservation efforts, too. Like art-making, conservation work can be daunting and thankless, and I'm sure my uncle is gratified that local news outlets have taken an interest in his work in Southland.

Image credit: Schiele reproduction ripped from Voracité Instantanée tumblr

Platte Clove Residency: Encounter On Devil's Path

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 23:44:00 +0000

Devil's Path Trail; Catskills; NY; July 2012
I value solitude, but prefer not to hike alone. In the event of an injury, it's always better to have a companion. Moreover, since moving west, I've learned that even an ambitious mountain lion is unlikely to consider two or more humans fair game. Simply put, a duo or small group is afforded greater peace of mind. Sometimes, though, in order to take advantage of a window of opportunity, hiking solo is the only option.

Frankly, as I set out from the Platte Clove cabinon my first morning in the Catskills, safety concerns were far from my mind. I'm a confident hiker and I was excited to explore the 7.5-mile route I'd plotted the night before. My planning, though, had been cursory. I didn't realize that Wikipedia describesthe longest segment of my loop as "the toughest hiking trail in the Eastern United States." (In retrospect, I should have been clued in to the trail's difficulty by its name, Devil's Path.) I also shrugged off wildlife precautions. Though they may be the region's namesake, mountain lions were extirpated from the Catskills by the early 20th century; American black bears, however, are plentiful, and regional trail guides encourage hikers to wear bells and to talk at a normal volume so as to alert the animals of their presence. That's good advice, but amateur naturalists like myself shun bells and, when on trails, frown upon extended conversation. We don't go into the woods or up mountains for a constitutional. We go to see other animals, be they birds, porcupines, snakes, squirrels, or bears, and the less noise we make, the more creatures we're privileged to see.

About thirty minutes from the cabin, I paused on the trail, removed my backpack, and crouched to take a few sips of water. I thumbed through the pages of National Geographic's Birds of North America and contemplated the glorious morning -- warm, but not hot, with a mountain breeze. I'd neither seen nor heard any other hikers, but the Catskill woods were alive with bird song, the sprightly sounds of squirrels and chipmunks foraging, and the occasional rattle of a cicada. Yet as I skimmed the bird guide's descriptions of different species' calls, I noticed that a relative quiet had come over my area of the forest. Some squirrels still bounced through litterfall, but fewer birds sung out, and less regularly. I lowered the field guide and looked around. Through some trailside saplings, I glimpsed a dark shape about sixty yards ahead of me on the trail. Because of the distance and the obscured view, I couldn't be sure of the creature's size. I thought it might be a large turkey. I lifted my binoculars and, as the form came into focus, realized I was looking at fur. I panned slightly to the right and glimpsed the animal's eyes and tan snout. It swung its head low above the trail, scenting. I was thrilled! I'd hoped to see a black bear while visiting the Catskills and, half an hour into my first long hike, I was admiring one!

It was an average-sized bear -- it stood a little under three feet to the shoulder -- and I was unable to determine if it was male or female. Disappointingly, less than a minute after I'd trained my binoculars on the stocky caniform, it disappeared behind a boulder situated at a blind turn on the trail. As soon as it was out of sight, my delight was subdued by practical considerations. The bear was ahead of me, hidden from view, but ambling along the same trail. Black bears aren't aggressive animals; they rarely attack humans and, when they do, they are usually repelled if the human defends itself. Had I been hiking with a companion, I wouldn't have given our safety a second thought. Standing alone on the trail, though, I felt quite vulnerable. The same trail guides that encourage bell-wearing suggest that if you've seen a black bear that hasn't seen, smelled, or heard you, you should make a detour or head in the other direction. Were I to ignore that counsel and instead proceed, I might surprise the bear and there would be some risk of it attacking in panic. Still, that outcome was extremely unlikely, and I was only a half-an-hour into a day-long hike. I was unwilling to turn around.

Platte Clove Nature Preserve Trail; Catskills; NY; July 2012
As I shouldered my backpack, I scanned the ground nearby and spotted a fallen beech branch about 4 1/2 feet long and four inches around. I picked it up and tested its strength. It didn't give. Holding it like a staff, I raised it a foot above the ground and brought one end down, hard, on a slab of bluestone. The sound of wood on rock reverberated throughout the surrounding forest. Head cocked and ears attentive, I listened, hoping to hear evidence of the bear's hasty retreat. Silence. I struck the bluestone again. As before, no sign that the bear had responded to the sound.

I'm comfortable and confident with firearms, and I longed to have one at that moment, a precaution in the unlikely event that the bear should decide I was a threat better attacked than fled from. Standing on the trail with the branch in one hand and binoculars in the other, I was surprised to find myself recalling a term paper I wrote during my senior year of high school about William Faulkner's 1942 short-story collection, Go Down, Moses. The principal focus of my essay was "The Bear," the longest story in Go Down, Moses and one of Faulkner's most famous works. "The Bear" chronicles the relationship between Faulkner's young protagonist, Isaac, and Old Ben, a large black bear. Old Ben is no ordinary bear, however. He is, metaphorically speaking, wilderness incarnate, and Faulkner introduces the bear through the stories told about him.

"...the long legend of corn-cribs broken down and rifled, of shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured and traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain and shotgun and even rifle shots delivered at point-blank range with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a child... [...The bear] ran in [Isaac's] knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print [...] too big for the very country which was its constricting scope."

Written in Faulkner's characteristic run-on style, the passage paints a picture of a frenzied and invincible beast, a fearsome animal that haunts the imaginations of the author's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Isaac, however, is unlike most of his Yoknapatawpha neighbors. Faulkner portrays the adolescent as a budding steward of the land, a proto-Leopold type who understands the forest as few people do. After initially tracking Old Ben without success, Isaac recognizes that he must be on equal terms with the bear in order to encounter it. Thus, the teenager enters the forest without a firearm. From my high school paper:

"The boy travels nine hours into the wilderness before he realizes he has not done enough. Isaac still has instruments of our 'progressive' civilization upon him. He removes his watch and compass, leaving them on a branch near him. [...] He has now thrown all forms of civilization away and is giving himself to the wilderness. Because of this action, Old Ben is now able to show himself."

On the Platte Clove trail, I was, like Isaac, unarmed. Unlike Isaac, I was uncertain and a little afraid. Although the symbolism and message of "The Bear" shaped my worldview in significant ways (I like to think of myself as "an Isaac"), 17 years after I first read the story, I was unwilling to advance on faith alone. The flesh-and-blood black bear ahead of me on the trail may not have been familiar with Faulkner; it might not have known that it was supposed to respect this particular clothed ape as a fellow child of the forest.

I hung my binoculars around my neck and picked up a heavy stone, one a little larger than my fist. I took a tentative step forward. I banged the branch staff on the ground again and, without consciously deciding to do so, expelled air suddenly from my abdominal cavity to summon a deep, rough bellow. It was an odd sound for a human to produce, my best approximation of an African lion's warning "cough." Years ago, when camping in Botswana's Okavango Delta, I'd been impressed (and surprised) by the big cat's vocalization. I hoped that my meek imitation of it would let the bear know where I was and convince it that I was a creature best avoided. More importantly, though, the "cough" made me feel more substantial. It didn't matter that it was a bluff. Adrenaline did its job; hackles raised, I felt stronger, intimidating.

I moved on, a few steps at a time, punctuating my progress with staff strikes and "coughs." Each of these noises was, like the first strike, followed only by silence. Birds in the area had stopped calling, presumably perplexed by the curiously loud and high-strung human. Still, although I hadn't heard it turn tail, I became increasingly confident that the bear had fled the area. Before long, I stood at the place on the trail where I'd first seen the bear walking. The boulder around which the animal had vanished from view was on my right. Before taking the step that would allow me to see what lay beyond the bend, I "coughed" once more, for good measure.

There was an explosion of needles, leaves, and twigs from the other side of the boulder, accompanied by a startled yawp. Aghast, my heart seized. This is it, I thought, as I turned the staff out like a lance and raised the rock in my left hand, ready to put up what fight I could when the bear charged. The bear, though, wasn't at all interested in a confrontation. After the sounds of its initial shock, I heard the bear's heavy retreat; it scrambled away from me at first, moving west, parallel to the trail, then turned north and blundered downhill. Standing next to the trailside boulder, still on edge and clutching the rock and branch, I wondered why the bear hadn't responded to my noisy approach before I'd moved so close. Fortunately, it was at least as frightened of tangling with me -- or, more accurately, of tangling with the lion-creature it heard cough so nearby -- as I was of it.

After I put down the rock, regained some semblance of composure, and continued on the Devil's Path, I found myself thinking about the role of stress in our lives. Surely it wouldn't have been a good idea for me to bound carefree up the trail, likely surprising the bear with no boulder between us, but was my level of wariness warranted? Had a useful stress response become counterproductive? I believe so.

Jimmy Dolan Notch Trail; Catskills; NY; July 2012
In RadioLab's episode on stress, originally broadcast in 2007, Robert Sapolsky, a neurologist at Stanford University, explains that the classic physiological effects of stress hormones-- the rush of adrenaline, the increased heart rate, and the body's turning off of non-essential functions such as digestion and growth -- are "a great thing if you're stressed like a normal mammal." Stress evolved to help us stay alive. The trouble is, modern humans aren't typically stressed in the same way that other mammals are. In the example used in the RadioLab episode, if you're an impala fleeing a lion on the African savannah, the stress response provides the antelope with a chance of survival by making it temporarily stronger, faster, and hyper-alert. But "when people talk about stress," RadioLab co-host Robert Krulwich asks Sapolsky, "or stress diseases, or being over-stressed or the stressfulness of modern life, what does that mean?" Sapolsky responds,

"Almost certainly it means it has nothing to do with an impala running for it's life. Very few parking space fights are settled with axes. We don't have to wrestle people for canned food items. […] When you're actually getting stressed in the way that we talk about in the everyday sense, we're not being physically menaced. What we're doing is turning on the stress response in the anticipation of a stressor. […] That's not what the system evolved for. […It's one thing to] increase your blood pressure out the wazoo to run for you life for three minutes. Increase it chronically every time you come to work and -- stress-induced hypertension -- you're going to damage the walls of your blood vessels."

My encounter with the black bear is more similar to Sapolsky's fleeing impala example than to first world problems like dropped cell phone calls, crowded supermarkets, or fraught workplace relationships, but my stress response was still anticipatory. I wasn't yet running from or wrestling the bear, but my body was already on red alert, muscles tensed and mind electric. Even after the bear had fled, I remained apprehensive. By contrast, once the impala is out of immediate danger, the animal's stress response halts. Although (as I explained in an earlier Platte Clove residency essay), nature's existential threats can free us "from the burdens of our domesticated lives because, for a moment or minutes, nothing matters except survival," I believe that the anxiety of my bear encounter was far greater than it needed to be, a result, I think, of the languishing of my "inner Isaac."

In 1999, Baz Luhrmann scored an offbeat pop hit with his single, "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", in which he read all of Mary Schmich's famous 1997 Chicago Tribune column, "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young." The song/column includes the line, "Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft." Whether I qualify as hard or soft, I've followed the geographical recommendations to the letter. I came up in rural Virginia, but adopted New York City as my home immediately after college, and lived there just long enough to be deemed an official New Yorker (conventional wisdom sets 10 years as the mark). Now, I call San Francisco and the greater Bay Area my home range. I've lived in cities for fully half of my life and, although I spend more time on trails than most city dwellers, I am essentially an urban creature. I'm reluctant to characterize myself as such -- I wear camouflage hunting caps and claim my rural southeastern roots with pride -- but perhaps I was so anxious as I approached the trail's bend because, deep down, I know I'm no longer a "child of the forest," if I ever was one.

Being honest with yourself is not always easy. Sometimes, hiking solo is the perfect opportunity.

Image credits: all photographs, Christopher Reiger, 2012

WAH Center's "Wildlife in the Post-Natural Age"

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Kimberly Witham
"Orange Glove"
Several of my 2008 and 2009 works are included in the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center's "Wildlife in the Post-Natural Age," a group exhibition curated by artist-curator Cara DeAngelis that features work by 20 artists.

From the exhibition press release:

"The show focuses on work that addresses the interplay between wildlife and our domesticated selves and spaces. It probes the persistence of wildlife in American culture and individual imagination through the work of a diverse group of city-based artists. The varied works evoke a reconsideration of the term ‘wild’ in what Gary Snyder has called a Post-Natural Age, and the role that artists are playing in exploring these issues."

"Wildlife in the Post-Natural Age" runs from September 7-28, 2012. More information can be found here.

Image credit: copyright, Kimberly Witham

Meditations #5

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:11:00 +0000

Platte Clove Residency: Coastal Differences

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:43:00 +0000

View of Devil's Path Trail; Catskills; NY; July 2012
Five years ago, while traveling in South America, I met a young woman from the West Coast of the United States. After the trip, we corresponded for a while, and she related news of her move from southern California to New England. An outdoorsy sort, she prioritized exploration of the parks in her new neck of the woods, but she wrote that the eastern forests unnerved her. During the summer months especially, they seemed dense and suffocating, a patchwork of green that closed in around her.

At the time, her observation amused me. Having grown up on the East Coast, I was at home in the mixed deciduous and pine forests of eastern North America. By contrast, the Endor-like redwood and sequoia forests of the Pacific coast and the mixed coniferous forests of the continental divide and the American Southwest, environments in which I'd had little or no experience but with which my friend was very familiar, seemed otherworldly to me.

Now, however, a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over two years, I'm accustomed to the rolling, golden landscapes of the East Bay and the Peninsula and I'm nowhere happier than in the soaring canopy of the Pacific coastal forests. Here, because the trails are generally more broad and the undergrowth and trees more sparse than is typical of eastern woodlands, wildlife viewing is easier than it is "back East." But while Bay Area hikers are often granted excellent views of birds and mammals, long minutes will occasionally pass without our seeing or hearing any fauna at all. By contrast, East Coast forests offer a greater relative density of animal life; there, you're always seeing or hearing something.

This fact was plain when I visited the Catskills this July. During my time in New York's woods, there was rarely a quiet moment; grey squirrels chattered, red-eyed vireos called, woodpeckers rapped at tree trunks, Eastern chipmunks scampered through dry forest litter. It's noteworthy, though, that all of these creatures were generally heard and not seen. Branches and undergrowth obscured my view or hid wildlife from sight entirely; many birds went unidentified because I have an untrained ear (truly competent birders can identify a species by call, a skill I'm only just beginning to hone). Even in clearings, where I waited for birds to wing through, I was limited to fleeting glimpses, birds that cheeped across my field of vision but vanished in the shaded shrubs and saplings fringing the glade.

I'm a casual, but conscientious birder. I note all the species I see on a day's outing, and a typical California hike will result in list of a dozen species or more, but my list for three days in the Catskills only includes six species seen: the Eastern phoebe (discussed at length in an earlier post); a dark-eyed junco; black-capped chickadee; turkey vultures; a veery or Swainson's thrush (I didn't get a good look); and a hen ruffed grouse. It was a treat to see so many Eastern chipmunks, a number of American toads, and several wood frogs, but the wildlife highlight of the trip was, without a doubt, an American black bear. In part because of the Catskills' dense growth, said bear and I had an uncomfortably close encounter, which I'll relate in my upcoming essay.

Image credits: photograph, Christopher Reiger, 2012

Platte Clove Residency: John Muir and the View From the Precipice

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 22:02:00 +0000

Winter view of Platte Clove's Bridal Veil Falls;
Catskills; NY

“Many people have been killed after falling and sliding off the edge. Especially in areas where there are pine needles. Dangerous conditions exist in many locations. The number of deaths over the years is staggering. Be overly cautious when in this region, and do not take un-necessary risk.”

- “Upper Platte Clove” page of Catskill Mountaineer website

I hesitated before deciding to investigate the unmarked spur of the Platte Clove Nature Preserve's Plattekill Falls Trail. Having recently read a bit about the geology and topography of the Catskill Escarpment, I knew that the preserve is located near the top of a deep ravine that tumbles suddenly down and eastward to meet the Hudson Valley (clove is the Dutch word for a mountain gorge). I’d also learned that each year a handful of foolhardy or unlucky hikers fall to their deaths on Platte Clove area trails. An online trail guide I’d browsed prior to the residency urged hikers to be “overly cautious.” Nevertheless, once I’d stepped off the main path and advanced a few steps down the spur, I was self-assured; I wouldn’t be one of 2012’s casualties. Prudent types like me don’t fall off cliffs.

Such confidence proves misguided at least as often as it is justified, but I didn’t consider that until, from a vantage point 100 yards along the trail spur, I looked down a section of the clove's headwall to another shelf of rock and soil perhaps 50 feet below. Beyond that ledge, my eyes fell far to sunlit treetops. The effect was vertiginous. Instinctively, I leaned away from the drop and squatted to lower my center of gravity. I shuffled low over the leaf litter and pine straw until I was sufficiently far from the brink to breathe easy. My bravado was rebuffed.

The quiet panic I experienced when I appreciated Platte Clove’s plunge for the first time was the result of our animal drive for self-preservation. Considered from a safe remove, however, I was stirred less by the prospect of my own mortality than by the fact of everything’s impermanence. The ravine is a dramatic reminder that all landscapes are in flux. The Catskill Escarpment pictured in Hudson River School paintings is recognizable today; the peaks, valleys, waterfalls, and outcroppings appear largely unchanged. But the scenery is not static. Imperceptibly, it is morphing.

That evening, back in the Platte Clove residency cabin, I reviewed the geological history of the Catskill Escarpment that I’d packed. During the Silurian period, about 400 million years ago, the region was a vast river delta and shallow, inland sea. Slowly, over the next 75 million years, mountains rose to the east. The sea’s limestone bedrock was in time covered by eroded material that washed down from the mountains, and this sediment eventually formed the shale and sandstone strata that the Catskill Mountains are known for today. 325 to 260 million years ago, the continents that we now call North America and Africa collided, and the region was thrust upward, creating dramatic mountain ranges and plateaus. As time and the elements acted on the new landform, the upper levels of the Catskill Escarpment plateau were eroded, creating stream basins, mountains, and valleys. Much more recently, between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago, Illinoian glaciers scoured the region, steepening its slopes and etching the deep trench that, following further erosion during the last Ice Age, became the ravine we now know as Platte Clove. Millions of years in the shaping, a measure of time comprehensible only in the abstract, Platte Clove continues to be carved and reworked by the creek that today flows through it to the Hudson.

Because I’d just read a recent issue of Sierra, the Sierra Club’s magazine, on the flight east, I found myself contemplating the geological convulsions of the Catskills region alongside the message and tenor of Sierra’s articles. Compared to the tumultuous world of geology, the nature celebrated in the magazine’s pages seems like a peaceable kingdom. Certainly, the different time scales matter a great deal (one obviously occurs on the geologic level and we don't see the action, while Sierra’s perspective is limited to more recent and observable history – see Figure 1, an old diagram I created elucidating the multiple experiences of time), but a full appreciation of natural history and the outdoors requires a panoramic perspective. Focusing only on our moment and that which immediately preceded it is problematic. We must elude nostalgia’s withering grip; what came before is not necessarily better than what is or what will be. Easier said than done. Humans, like all successful animals, survive by prioritizing the clear and present over long range planning and imagination. Despite our tremendous capacity, we suffer from an evolved myopia. As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's wrote, "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."

Figure 1: My oh-so-professional diagram of different time scales
Cognizant of that deficit, I’m often frustrated by the rhapsodic tone and wistfulness that predominates so much contemporary nature writing. The writers present only part of the picture. I'm no naysayer, mind you; every day, I rejoice in the beauty and wonder of the world, but I break with writers when they characterize nature as a wholly beneficent and fragile entity. Too many fail to free themselves from the legacy of Thoreau and Muir, 19th and early 20th century giants of the genre who, while a treat to read, proffer a romanticized account of nature.

Muir’s insistence that nature revitalizes the spirit, that it acts as a balm for civilization’s ails, is justified, but his essays provide an incomplete picture of why the outdoors are restorative. In his 1901 book, Our National Parks, he wrote,

"Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

It’s lovely stuff, and it’s true that a certain kind of angst -- the “first world problem” variety – is forgotten when we’re exposed to the “freshness” and “energy” of meadows, mountains, forests, and storms. But several of my experiences on the trails around Platte Clove gave rise to anxieties of a different sort. Looking over a precipice or encountering a bear at close range, we are freed from the burdens of our domesticated lives because, for a moment or minutes, nothing matters except survival. My bank account balance, car engine trouble, the politics of family planning, geology…all of these concerns fall away. Muir celebrates one aspect of our encounter with nature (e.g., “darlings” and “good tidings”), but he ignores the existential dread that plays a vital role.

In 1913, Muir wrote "whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes - all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them." There is much gentle beauty and grace in the natural world. We’re moved to reverie by the dreamy sweep of a turkey vulture on mountain thermals or the nervous dance of a swallowtail low across a meadow, but the bird is seeking carrion and the butterfly nectar and a mate. When contemplating nature, we shouldn't ignore the base drives that provide its backbone. Even those of us who believe we humans must hearken to the better angels of our nature ought to recognize that the lion doesn’t lie with the lamb. Moreover, most creatures, lambs included, are not one-dimensional. They are not either vicious or gentle; they are both. Muir's whales and elephants don't just dance. They fight, too. And, no matter how alluring the alliteration, microbes can't fairly be called mischievous; some are, however, accomplished killers. If we could ask Muir, I wonder if he’d agree that the "divine radium" is in all of creation, in the good, in the terrible, and in the ambivalent. I’m fairly confident he would not.

In Muir’s writing, ideology almost always trumps clear-headed reckoning. He advanced a Manichaean narrative with humanity cast as the bungling villain. This account isn't baseless. It's true, after all, that our widespread and assertive species impacts the world in often deleterious ways. It’s also the case that a great many ecosystems are imperiled because they're so delicately balanced. On the whole, though, nature is ambivalent and abiding, not beneficent and fragile.

It's our particular, temperate moment that is precarious. That being so, nature writers have an obligation to draw attention to the ways in which our species' recklessness and blossoming population burden the ecology of our day and thereby threaten the “limits of the world,” but by painting a picture of Eden, as many do, they tiptoe close to Disney's cloying and distorted vision of ecology, one macerated in syrupy sweetness and overlaid with Scar-Simba dualities.

View at trail edge alongside Platte Clove ravine; Platte Clove Nature Preserve; Catskills; NY; July 2012
It's no wonder, then, that I cheer Werner Herzog’s infamously bleak take on jungle ecosystems in the documentary, "Burden of Dreams." "We have to become humble,” Herzog said, “in front of this overwhelming misery, and overwhelming fornication, and overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order.” The quotation serves as an antipode to the paeans produced by most poet naturalists, and Les Blank, the documentary's director, creates dynamic tension by punctuating Herzog's rant, which continues for minutes, with footage of ambling jungle beetles, tree frogs at rest, and leafcutter ants carrying their harvest. At what point does the base, violent striving of existence meet the profound beauty of being? Or are they one and the same?

I believe the latter to be true, and when we marry those two, apparently contradictory interpretations, Herzog's frightful and overwhelming nature and Muir's "divine harmony," the union is something like Soren Kierkegaard's "fear and trembling" or Schopenhauer's definition of the Sublime. Schopenhauer prescribed the Sublime as a remedy to his everyman limits. In his volume The World As Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer elucidated a scale of aesthetic experience. At one end of this spectrum, he described the “Feeling of Beauty” as “Light...reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt [the] observer.)” At the other end of the spectrum, the philosopher positioned the “Full Feeling of Sublime” and the “Fullest Feeling of Sublime.” These categories are described, respectively, as “Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects.),” and “Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature.)”

Schopenhauer’s “Feeling of Beauty,” then, is akin to Muir’s carefree experience of nature, “warm” and “fun.” The “Fullest Feeling of Sublime,” however, is Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling,” it is the ecstasy of one’s subsumption into being at large, a reduction or erasure of the self-conscious individual and a simultaneous opening of the individual to the wilderness within. In that moment, at last, nature is given its due, the lion and the lamb as one multifarious beast.

"This grand show is eternal," Muir wrote. Indeed, and how grand it is! As the Catskill Escarpment’s natural history illustrates, nature is a raging monarch, astonishing, awesome, and totally ambivalent. And here we are, in this particular moment, alive. Hopefully, we'll strike a balance that allows us to appreciate the view from the precipice, trembling and grateful.

View into section of Platte Clove ravine; Catskills; NY
Note: The sections of this essay dealing with Herzog and Schopenhauer are reworked versions of excerpts from past Hungry Hyaena pieces, "Review In Brief: Kota Ezawa at Haines Gallery" (February 2012) and "Christopher Saunders' 'Whitenoise'" (December 2009).

Photo credits: Winter Bridal Falls photo, Michael Stanislaw (date unknown); Photoshop illustration of time scales, Christopher Reiger, 2006; Platte Clove trail edge view, Christopher Reiger, 2012; Platte Clove ravine photo ripped from CatskillSearch.com

Meditations #4

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:02:00 +0000

Platte Clove Residency: Some Remove

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 03:45:00 +0000

Plattekill Falls; Platte Clove Nature Preserve;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
On the first afternoon of my residency at Platte Clove, after settling into the cabin and familiarizing myself with local trail maps, I decided to explore a short path that begins a few steps from the cabin's porch and winds its way down one of the valley's uppermost gorges to Plattekill Falls. It was a lovely reintroduction to the Catskills. Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the mixed forest's overstory, unevenly illuminating a floor decorated with eastern hemlock cones. Hidden from view in the canopy above, red-eyed vireos ceaselessly repeated their lilting questions.

At the trail's end, I discovered four local twenty-somethings swimming in the waterfall's plunge pool. As they frolicked nearby, I searched for timber rattlesnakes among broken slabs of bluestone that littered the south-facing slope of the ravine. Although I turned up no snakes, I rousted a number of American toads, a species so common in the eastern United States that I long took them for granted. Absence, as the adage has it, makes the heart grow fonder; because American toads are not found out west, I was especially glad to see them.

Eastern hemlock cones; Platte Clove Nature Preserve;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
By the time I returned to the trailhead, dusk was fast approaching. An Eastern phoebe chipped at me from its perch on a low-hanging branch. Light in color and smallish, I guessed the bird was a female. As she pumped her tail and flitted from branch to fence post and back, I offered my best chip replies to her persistent calls and snapped a few photographs.

Half-an-hour later, while I was sitting near a cabin window reading J.A. Baker's The Peregrine in the day's last light, I heard faint scratching sounds and peeping from the cabin's second floor. Expecting to discover mice, I ascended the steep stairs but, before my eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the second floor interior, my attention was arrested by a whirring blur outside the screen of a low-slung window on the cabin's north wall. The bird must have seen me moving within, for it disappeared as quickly as it had materialized. The urgent cries of its young, however, which began when it approached the cabin, continued for some seconds after it had gone.

When the young birds quieted, I carefully lay down on the floor and inched closer to the screen, so that my face was a few feet away. I waited, though not for long, and the adult bird returned, a high-strung throb of wings. It hovered for a beat, then darted up and under the cabin's eave to join its imploring chicks. In the instant it afforded me, I recognized it as the Eastern phoebe I'd photographed, and it occurred to me that her earlier chipping was likely an attempt to draw my attention away from the nest's location.

Eastern Phoebe nest at Platte Clove cabin; Platte Clove
Nature Preserve; Catskills; NY; July 2012
I lay on the cabin floor for some time, watching the phoebe parent come and go, each visit feeding her voracious chicks an insect she caught on the wing. While I wasn't able to observe her hunting from my vantage point, I imagined it well enough. I've long been an admirer of phoebes' predatory prowess. They're members of the large tyrant flycatcher family, Tyrannidae, a group famous for "hawking" or "sallying," hunting behavior whereby the bird springs off its perch, grabs an insect in mid-air, and returns to its original position. I thought of a passage I'd read, not twenty minutes before, in The Peregrine.

"I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. [...] All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalize his song, and forget the killing that sustains it."

Baker, like all natural historians, amateur and professional alike, recognized that death is the way of life. As my father is fond of saying, "every day something dies so that I can continue to live." This is universally true, even for the most dedicated and conscientious Buddhist. To believe otherwise is to be either ignorant or willfully naive. But, vitally, the death of a moth, worm, or man is not the end of the line but instead a point along the way. It is the end of that individual creature, of course, but the energy cached in the discrete body is paid forward, as it were, passed on to the greater whole.

Longtime readers of my essays might recall that my preferred term for this pay-it-forward process is reconstitution, the biological version of the afterlife. As I wrote several years ago,

"Most people find contemplation of the body's posthumous decomposition uncomfortable. But the knowledge that my corporeal substance will rot and, in doing so, release energy for use by the rest of things is deeply satisfying. Poet Galway Kinnell describes reconstitution in his poem 'The Quick and the Dead' as 'the crawling of new life out of the old, which is what we have for eternity on earth.' [Beyond] the biological, death remains a mystery. I can not, one way or the other, speak to supernatural transference, though I feel that metaphysical notions of self or soul preservation are misguided. The 'me,' I think, will rot with my body, but the flow keeps on keeping on, until the end of time."**

Kinnell's poem describes reconstitution beautifully and succinctly, but it was author and essayist Edward Hoagland who wrote the passage that provided me with my principal symbol for reconstitution, the phoebe. In On Nature, Hoagland muses,

"In my stint in the army, working at the hospital morgue, I'd noticed how commonly the dead had managed at the last moment a benign or temperate sort of smile. This circularity is neither alarming nor incongruous, but rather seems to make things whole and complete. In the summer, dancing butterflies of pretty colors will congregate where I've gone outside to piss in the grass. The glint of tiger yellow or cobalt blue in their beautiful wings may be enhanced by the minerals that they so crave and that my body has declared surplus. And if a nesting phoebe soon grabs one, she is going to profit also -- which is a foretaste of the myriad uses that more extensive portions of me will be put to eventually."

In late 2010, I created a small artwork entitled, "the black phoebe (reconstitution)." (The black phoebe is the Eastern phoebe's western cousin.) Shortly after my move from New York City to San Francisco during the summer of 2010, I delighted in watching a black phoebe hawking on the surf-sculpted rocks of a Pacific beach. As I did so, I thought about another, less dramatic variety of reconstitution, the adaptation and reinvention that follows a significant life transition, be it a new job or a cross-country move. The mixed-media artwork inspired by that black phoebe is a simple celebration of reconstitution, but it was also a way of attaching myself to western fauna, a way of locating myself in my new habitat.

It's curious that it often requires some remove to understand one's own inspiration. I don't think I fully appreciated what impelled the creation of "the black phoebe (reconstitution)" until, on the cool wood of the Platte Clove cabin's second story, I watched and listened to the Eastern phoebe feed her young.

Christopher Reiger
"the black phoebe (reconstitution)"
2010
Pen and sumi ink, gouache, watercolor, marker, and thread on cut Arches paper
14 x 15 1/4 inches
** I'd amend my earlier observation; I now view "the flow" that "keeps on keeping on" as congruous with both philosophical materialism and conceptions of the numinous (in the sense that Rudolf Otto popularized).

Image credits: all photos, Christopher Reiger, 2012; artwork, Christopher Reiger, 2010

Platte Clove Residency: Report

noreply@blogger.com (Hungry Hyaena) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 03:25:00 +0000

Platte Clove cabin; Platte Clove Nature Preserve;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
It was much too short a stay, but my residency at the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development's Platte Clove cabin was otherwise terrific. In the coming weeks, I'll post photographs and a number of short essays about my time there. Some of the experiences I'll share with readers provided quality grist for the art mill, and I expect to begin work on new pictures soon.

As a side note, I'm grateful for the generosity of Jeremiah Teipen and Eun Young Choi, artist friends of mine who graciously lent me their car for the drive from New York City to Platte Clove (and back), and for the thoughtfulness of Katie Palm, CCCD Education Director, who went above and beyond in her role as the coordinator of the residency program. Thank you!

View from Sherman's Point; Devil's Path Trail;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
Image credits: all photos, Christopher Reiger, 2012