Ann Schnake
June 15-August 15
Dung Beetles and Humans Navigate by The Moon and the Milky Way
dirt, tumble weeds, leaves, shop towels, dryer lint, human hair, horsehair, artificial hair, feather, medical grade rubber tubing, paper, cardboard, string, wire + other found materials + paper, tea, paint
My art practice revolves around physical structures of sculpture and installation. One part of my practice is to make globes out of the discarded materials in my surroundings, whatever I find, from plant material to plastic. I repetitively gather, cover, wind, tie, compress and wind again. Because I have been a nurse, a cook and a caregiver for most of my life, in all forms of sculptural works, l hanker for the handling, the raw physicality of materials, the more corporeal the better. All the balls are visuality, poetics and a bodily response to the sense of collapsing worlds and dying suns in amber skies; they are also an embodiment of ideas of planetary time and space, a reminder of being on a planet. Lately these sculptural globes have joined a flat world of paint, tea, graphite, paper, and narrative. I go from ideas of global embodiment to ball rolling to painting pictures of balls and back again.
When I speak of global embodiment, I think of when we drive into the sunset or the horizon and we do not fall off a flat earth, we have a glimmer of our planetary placement; There are other moments when we experience a perspective of time and place, beyond the small aspects of our immediate lives, experiencing an embodied sense of being interconnected on a planet, in a universe. And there are still other moments when our generalized condition of teetering ecologic, economic and political breakdown destabilizes our location in time, imagination and geography. We attempt to simultaneously hold memories and imagination of intact structures, disaster and possibility, past, present and future AND awe of what exists in the present moment. Sometimes more than what we can hold logically, maybe time travel between realms of visuality and understanding are tickets we can reach for.
But more simply, I am embodying the dung beetle when I make balls. Dung beetles and humans share the ability to navigate by the moon and the Milky Way. Dung beetles roll balls of animal excrement, forming giant earthy balls that can be more than one thousand times their weight, equivalent to a human pulling six filled buses. Some entomologists think that dung beetles help each other, that when a beetle with a ball encounters an obstacle in their pathway, compatriot beetles push the balls along in assistance. Other entomologists believe that pirate beetles plot theft of balls from beetles in distress. As humans, we also can choose to be pirates OR to enact compassion, deny greed, and find better ways of living.