I mentioned this earlier, but it's now less than a week away! I'll be participating in this event at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum. Check out this link to the LASM website to learn more.
Usually animals who are in the process of shedding are quite shy, so I haven't seen Lex shed in quite a while (when she was a baby I saw bits of it as very juvenile crested geckos have a harder time getting their shed off). But last night, she popped up with a superhero mask and cape of her own dead skin.
I assumed her surprisingly social behavior was a request for more humidity to aid in the detaching and easy consumption of her shed, so after taking her photo I spritzed her and watched as she ate it all within the next half hour.
Did you know that there's a Dead Animal Tales exhibition at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum featuring animals who came into interestingly fatal contact with humanity? One of the latest additions is a stone marten who got electrocuted while breaching the Large Hadron Collider's substation fence. The Guardian wrote an article on the exhibition which is worth reading in its entirety, but here's an excerpt:
The stone marten [...] joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armoured, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defence did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week.
It was another unfortunate incident that spurred Moeliker to establish the exhibition in the first place. In 1995, a male duck flew into the glass facade of the museum and died on impact, a fate that did not deter another male duck from raping the corpse for 75 minutes. The incident ruffled feathers in the community but earned Moeliker a much-coveted IgNobel prize when he published his observations . “I was the one and only witness,” Moeliker said. “I’m a trained biologist but what I saw was completely new to me.”
The gay necrophiliac duck sex act is elaborated on here, if you're compelled - as I was - to read more about it. Apparently there may or may not have been a similar case witnessed between two American squirrels.
And here's another exhibition I'm showing work in - it's the Animals in Art national exhibition juried by Lori Skoog and Katherine Weston at A Different Path Gallery in Brockport, New York. Three of my pieces will be on display: Perfect Form, Echo, and Littoral Layers.
The show opens with a reception this Friday (tomorrow!), March 10th, from 7-9pm and will be on exhibit through April 1, 2017. The gallery is located at 27 Market Street, Brockport, NY 14420.
My collaboration with Dr. John Pojman and his company 3P (Pojman Polymer Products) has led to my exhibiting in this amazing show! Polymers in Art Through the Centuries is a fantastically interesting exhibition held at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum (LASM) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Polymers in Art Through the Centuries opened today! Its show dates are March 4 - June 4, 2017, and it is held in the Soupçon Gallery in the LASM. For information about the LASM hours of operation and cost of admission (though please note that there are a number of free admission days), please check this link out.
I will be demonstrating 3P QuickCure Clay and discussing my work with the sculptural and relief medium along with Dr. John Pojman onsite at the LASM during their Art After Hours: The Substance of Art event on Thursday, March 30, 2017 from 5:30 - 7:30pm. Other artists including Monica Zeringue, violist and composer Christian Frederickson, and local dance company Of Moving Colors will be contributing to the evening as well, and A Work in Process: Paintings by Gustave Blache III and It’s Academic: A Hands-On Art Experience will also be open for viewing. Complimentary wine and appetizers are included with admission, which is $7.50 for adults, $5.50 for college students with ID, and free for members.
By the time I reached the discounted post-Christmas sale in Concordia's Walmart, there was a lone Amaryllis bucket/bulb left. I picked it up, potted it up, and lo and behold: Amaryllis Minerva in all her glory! If I keep the bulb planted and happy through early fall and then depot and store it, I should be able to keep it for next year's winter flowers!
This is either finished or close to finished - I have a tendency to tweak works slightly for a number of days after the piece is "done."
I'm naming it the closest English translation of the sloth's name: Pilgrim (Peregrina).
Pilgrim is 3P QuickCure Clay and acrylic on a 6x12" basswood panel.
My good friend John Pojman sent me this box of grow-it-yourself oyster-mushroom-spore-inoculated sawdust for Christmas! (I know, I should probably have posted this back then, but it's not a time-dependent post since they're growable year-round, so I just let this post kick around my drafts section while other more pressing posts went up, and then I just forgot about it for a while!) I am always excited to have the opportunity to grow my own mushrooms from these type of kits as they make it super simple to do. Here's what you can look forward to if you want to do this yourself!
I met Ariel while in residency at La Maison Verte this past summer, and now she's coming to exhibit with USM in Goppert Gallery! Her work will be on display February 17-March 10, with an opening reception tomorrow from 3-5pm.
Here's the full press release!
I saw this photo while browsing Reddit a few days ago; it gives me a sort of odd comfort in metaphorically depicting that if we as humanity can just avoid completely taking the world out with us as we continue on towards our own extinction, the rest will soldier on just fine.
As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching an extra course this semester - Honors Seminar: Interdisciplinary Art. The course is structured into a few different sections, with the first exploring my own interdisciplinary interests (science and art, particularly involving the fields of ecology, biology, anatomy, botany, and my collaborative work in chemistry with Dr. John Pojman developing 3P QuickCure Clay).
For this segment, the students must use QCC and make at least one piece of artwork that explores the fields listed above that are interdisciplinary interests of mine. Since it's such a personal-to-me assignment, I decided I'd join in on the project. I'd considered doing a sloth for a while - I met and got to directly interact with one named Peregrina in Peru during my 2014 residency there - but I didn't want the piece to be too cutesy so I kept dismissing the subject matter until I felt ready to tackle it with a somewhat more complex take on the animal. I decided the time is now, mostly due to finding this elongated panel (its dimensions are 6x12") which felt like a perfect match to the gangly nature of the sloth.
I plan to paint it, so the end piece will look considerably different than this, but here's a sneak peek at the relief work before adding any paint.
Let's take a momentary break from the bleak ramifications of our current administration's damaging new ecological policies to appreciate the recent flowers my houseplants chose to produce in the past month. Here we have the mostly spent bloom stalk we saw in its infancy back in December from my Sansevieria phillipsiae, as well as a rogue early flower on my Hatiora gaertneri (often colloquially called "Easter Cactus" because it typically blooms around that holiday, much like Schlumbergera truncata blooms around Thanksgiving and is thusly called "Thanksgiving Cactus") which I hope will continue to flower as April approaches, two bloom stalks on my Echeveria harmsii 'Red Velvet', and a particularly beautiful blooming Tillandsia spp.; the last is - as is typical for bromeliads - monocarpic, so I'm hoping it manages to pup out before its hastening death.
In yet another disheartening move by the new Trump administration, the United States Department of Agriculture has removed a variety of documentation regarding animal welfare and enforcement of current standards of care from their website. In a hilariously disingenuous statement, this decision is explained as being based in part due to the USDA's "commitment to being transparent."
I really hope my blog doesn't end up as an incessant Cassandra dilemma, but that seems to be where we're headed.
Here's the latest in super depressing news: Republicans are somewhat literally gunning for the Endangered Species Act.
The Environmental Protection Agency was just frozen, "temporarily halt[ing] all contracts, grants and interagency agreements." It's also been placed under a media blackout. I cannot emphasize enough how problematic this is not only for its immediate effect but also for the implications this action has in conjunction with other decisions and promises - including sharply increasing drilling and mining operations in previously protected land - already made by Trump and his team. This will lead to short-term financial profit at the short-, middle-, and long-term expense of catastrophic environmental mismanagement. It's not a unique decision, unfortunately, but it is still a deeply wrong one to make.
Right after Trump assumed the presidency, the White House's webpage on climate change was deleted.
Meanwhile, Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, which beat the previous record that happened in 2015, which beat the previous record which took place during 2014. We've had three years in a row of highest temperatures on record for our planet.
The Spring 2017 semester is almost upon us! At the University of Saint Mary, we commemorate Martin Luther King Day instead of taking it as a holiday, so Monday was slated to be out first day of classes... but the weather has other plans, and to avoid the predicted ice storm and attempt to help unravel the resultant travel complications our students are already facing, we have canceled classes on Monday and will instead begin Spring 2017 classes on Tuesday.
This semester, I am teaching an overload (five classes instead of my typical four): Basic Design, Drawing II, Typography, Honors Seminar: Interdisciplinary Art, and Art Career Internship/Advanced Studios/Senior Exhibit. The overload is due to taking on the Honors Seminar; I'm very excited about it as I got to create the class entirely with our honor student population and my own academic interests in mind.
And speaking of seeds - my Anacampseros rufescens has bloomed repeatedly for me, and due to its self-fertile nature, it's produced seed pods at least twice that I've noticed. I also suspect it's a monocarpic plant (though googling has only led me to one other person willing to make that statement, so who knows for sure) as each branch that blooms severely dies back. Over time, this has meant my plant has become smaller and smaller. So when I spotted another seed pod in late September that still had seeds in it, I pounced. I grabbed it and then massaged it over the mother plant such that the tiny little seeds sprinkled into the same pot. I wasn't sure that would do anything, but I figured it was worth a shot. Several months later and... we have seedlings! Adorable little Anacampseros rufescens seedlings, some of which are even sprouting telltale white hairs! Take a peek - there are at least sixteen visible by my count and that's just one corner of the pot:
Speaking of the new year and new beginnings - something managed to pollinate my Aloe aristata (or potentially itself an Alworthia cross or a Haworthia spp. lookalike like Haworthia decipiens), and now I have seeds! I've never bothered to try to pollinate any of my Haworthia/Gasteria/Aloe flowers due to their long, thin throats, so this is a first for me. I plan to sow the seeds once all the pods have burst open. I slit a plastic cup in such a way that I fit it around the flower stem and covered it with saran wrap (with air holes) to try to catch the seeds, as the pods apparently explode with some force in order to scatter their goods far and wide. As you can see, one pod has already opened!
Happy New Year! Here are my houseplant blooms from December, minus my Senecio jacobsenii which rebloomed but is currently in my office and therefore I kept forgetting to bring my camera in. From left to right and top to bottom: Gasteria liliputana, Gymnocalycium bruchii, Haworthia cuspidata, Haworthia fasciata, Mammillaria bocasana, Pachyphytum oviferum (a little misleadingly as its bloom stalk is leaning past the trunk of my Uncarina roeoesliana), Phalaenopsis spp., Rhipsalis mesembryanthemoides, Sansevieria phillipsiae, Ibervillea lindheimeri, Euphorbia flanaganii, and Faucaria tigrina.
