At the heart of Catherine Chalmers’s solo exhibit, “We Rule,” is a set of four videos about ants that evoke core aspects of human culture: language, ritual, war, and art.
,” depicting the domestic bugs exploring a jungle, was called “perversely entertaining” and “deeply Darwinian” by, respectively, and won the 2008 Jury Award for Best Experimental Short at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The work encourages us to empathize with bugs. One reason they disgust us, Chalmers believes, is that they seem immoral, or at least differently moral. “We see ourselves as individuals,” she said.
In reality, to make “Antworks,” Chalmers attached the “art” to the rock herself; the ants took the leaves down, and she reversed the footage. She is an admirer of nature cinematographers, who employ canny techniques with wildlife. One cinematographer told her about his approach to filming a bat catching a moth: he used an air gun to shoot mealworms into the air, training the bats to expect food, then lobbed a moth while the camera rolled.
Having largely escaped her studio, Chalmers hopes to stay outside, at least when documenting living things. “The joy is going out and seeing a more complicated ecosystem, and trying to interact with that,” she said. She’s now working on a project involving the patterns that bark beetles leave on trees. She’d like to move her art outside, too.
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