Catherine Chalmers Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, and Prey April 3-May 22, 1999 Artist's Talk with Catherine Chalmers April 3 Henry Art Gallery Auditorium, University of Washington CoCA Members: Free; Public: $5; Students: $2 From April 3-May 22, CoCA will present Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, and Prey, the first substantial survey of New York artist Catherine Chalmers’s stunning and challenging photographic work on the complex relationship between human beings and the smaller creatures that inhabit the earth. Food Chain will open on April 3 at 8 p.m. At 7 p.m., Michael Sand, Senior Editor of Aperture and curator of the exhibit, will give a gallery talk that is open to the public. Music will be provided by Combo Craig (8-10 p.m.) and by Eternal 13 (after 10 p.m.). Admission to the opening is free to CoCA members and $5 for all others. Regular admission to the exhibition throughout its run (Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6 p.m.) is free to CoCA members, and by donation for the general public. Food Chain is a dynamic exhibition of photographs by Catherine Chalmers that presents an alluring view of the insect world. Blending aesthetic vision and technical precision, Chalmers uses close-up lenses and rapid shutter speeds to deftly exploit many of photography’s unique properties--its connection with realism, its ability to alter scale dramatically, and its peculiar relationship with time. Chalmers’ images lie at the intersection of science and art, thwarting viewers’ expectations and reinventing natural history for a culture increasingly removed from nature. In her project "Food Chain," the series that gives this exhibit its name, Chalmers investigates the place of insects in the hierarchy of living. This series sketches with vivid immediacy the linkage between predator and prey, eater and eaten, from plant to insect to amphibian. Working with animals she bred and raised in her New York City loft, Chalmers photographed a remarkable sequence that starts with bright green caterpillars eating a tomato and progresses to a praying mantis eating one of the tomato-bloated caterpillars, an image Chalmers compares to "squeezing paint out of a tube." The praying mantis meets its match in a tarantula, and another praying mantis comes to an untimely end in an encounter with a frog. For a subsequent series titled "Sex: Before, During, and After," Chalmers photographed the notorious mating ritual of the praying mantis, during and after which the female devours the male. Chalmers began her work with the food chain after breeding flies and photographing them up close, capturing their flight patterns, mating habits, and social interaction. Set against the stark white background that characterizes these projects, Chalmers’s flies have a larger-than-life quality that invites the viewer to reevaluate his or her relationship with the buzzing black bugs. "I was interested in working with an animal that lives a parallel life in our own home," says Chalmers. "I wanted to try to see things from their point of view, to see how they conduct their lives. What they do when they’re hanging out. How they socialize." Isolated, magnified, taken out of our bedrooms and away from unyielding windowpanes, these creatures seem to dance a free-spirited dance of life and love. Chalmers’ work with insects, spiders, and frogs led her to ponder the predator-prey dynamic higher up on the food chain. Her next project, "Pinkies," the pet-trade name for baby mice, documented the birth of baby mice and the inevitable arrival of their predators, a frog and a snake. "Pinkies" expanded on the theme originally developed in "Food Chain" by conveying the uncomfortable message that mammals are subject to the same immutable laws of nature as the so-called "lower" life forms. With a new series of photographs of roaches Chalmers turns her attention to the insects most abhorred by man. By photographing the roaches infesting a dollhouse, Chalmers gives them a menacing, gargantuan presence. She then subverts all expectations by hand painting some of the roaches to resemble other bugs and photographing them in simulated natural settings. Disguised as ladybugs or bumblebees, and refit into the world from which they once came, the roaches take on an otherworldly aura. Throughout Chalmers’ photography, a surprising range of insectile emotions seems to emerge, forcing us, as viewers, to confront our own preconceptions and fears about creatures ordinarily too small for us to encounter face to face and raises the question: do we appear as strange to them as they appear to us?