For most people, devotion to art stops well short of maintaining aquariums full of roaches in the living room. Photographer Catherine Chalmers is apparently used to the bugs, though. They're easier to deal with than the mice were. "It's not like you have to go in and clean the cage all the time," she says.
A slender woman with dark, loosely curly hair and striking pale blue eyes, Chalmers, '79, doesn't impress me as the sort to keep a menagerie of insects or rodents. She doesn't have a mad scientist look to her, nor that of a deranged New York artist -- even though the wall I'm looking at in her Manhattan apartment Is covered with photographs of cockroaches. This portion of her latest project, aptly titled Roaches, portrays them being executed in novel ways. Hanged, burned at a miniature stake, fried in a roach-size electric chair. All the various ways, in fact, that we humans are fond of executing one another. The roach sitting in the electric chair has a particularly lambent plume of sparks rising straight out of its -- well, head, I guess you'd say. Chalmers offers me another cup of tea.
We've been talking about the precipitous, twisty road to becoming an artist. And Chalmers is an artist -- a critically acclaimed one. Food Chain, the work preceding Roaches, has garnered substantial attention: solo shows at galleries in New York, Seattle, Vienna; group shows around the world; reviews and articles in publications as diverse as Harper's, Art-Forum and Art and Antiques; and recent publication in book form (Aperture Press, 2000; $29.95).
Early on, Chalmers didn't know exactly where she was headed. Her degree from Stanford was in engineering, and after graduation she went to work as a designer for Mattel's Barbie division. But she loved to paint and took art courses at night. After two years, she left Mattel for a graduate program in industrial design at the Royal College of Art in London, then switched to the MFA program in painting after a year. In 1985, degree in hand, she moved to New York.
Like many struggling artists, Chalmers worked for a gallery. But she felt odd earning next to nothing when her technical background easily could have provided a substantial, stable job. "Here I was with my Stanford degree, shuffling slides and papers," she says.
Finding her artistic voice proved as unpredictable a path as the road to artistic success. For Chalmers, the two roads converged with Food Chain, her photographic study of animal predators and their prey. "There's been a lot of focus in the art world in the last 20 years on gender and body image and so on," she says. "But one thing people haven't been doing in a very long time is using plants and animals in a way that's questioning. What's behind my interest is trying to bring the natural world and the cultural world into closer contact."
That said, knowing where you want to go isn't the same as knowing how to get there. In New York, Chalmers started painting in what she describes as a mythical-figurative mode -- creating half-human and half-animal images, for instance. Soon, though, she began incorporating organic materials in her palette -- dirt, crushed rose petals, dead bugs and so on -- and experimenting with reliefs and sculptural projects. Once she transformed a stove-top into something resembling a frog. "Some ideas were pretty much dead ends," Chalmers admits. Yet even a dead end can point to the right direction. "What I was trying to do was bring out the natural element in any of the objects I was working with -- but I was limited by the objects I was working with."
Houseflies proved to be the breakthrough. Dead ones were hard to come by in the numbers she needed, so she tracked down live ones at a biological supply house. "I thought I'd let them live their lives and die" -- a simple way to supply her needs. Instead, she found herself fascinated by the living flies, a fascination that only grew when a neighbor lent her a macro lens for her camera. "I could see everything. Their balance sacs, the hairs on their legs, the movements they made. The flies were the first time I'd ever raised an animal since having a dog when I was growing up," she explains, "and I realized then it was live animals I was trying to get to all along."
Though Chalmers had experimented with the camera before, she was largely a neophyte. And what she wanted to do was photograph these living flies in midair -- a plan, she notes now, that was "like deciding to be a surgeon as a kid and immediately rushing out and performing brain surgery."
But the fly photos, believe it or not, are beautiful. They're also unusual: close attention paid to a realm we typically ignore. They got Chalmers some art-world notice, which intensified with the photos in Food Chain.
The creatures in Food Chain are ones that exist below our daily radar: tobacco hornworms, praying mantises, toads, tarantulas, small snakes, baby mice. It's a disconcerting work -- disconcerting because it is violent, disconcerting because it is funny, disconcerting because it is macabre and disconcerting because on some level it shouldn't be disconcerting at all. As Will Cohu, an English art critic, noted, "Her starting point seems to be humor and compassion rather than ideas -- and that sets her apart from the pig-in-blue-formaldehyde school of conceptual artists. There's a visible battle in her work between revulsion and curiosity, but she emerges as an artist more interested in the processes of life than in decay."
Certainly humor and compassion are present when Chalmers recalls the practical difficulties of the project. Sometimes the mantises wouldn't mate; sometimes the tarantula wasn't hungry; and then there were the mice. "I really had a mouse population explosion," she recalls. "There were a lot more than my predators could handle." And as Food Chain progressed, it got harder and harder to send various creatures to their dooms. "Your choice is to become either numbed or sensitized, and I found myself more and more sensitized," Chalmers remembers.
Roaches, on the other hand, are easier to do away with -- though Chalmers admits to an occasional pang of remorse when she has to kill 20 or 30 at once. (She pops them in the freezer for 15 minutes.) That project, after all, has different ambitions: "What do we do when we hate an animal? What does that feel like? What is that about? Roaches is more about specific feelings that we have toward certain types of animals -- the aggression and violence and fear. We kill one, we kill twenty, we kill a hundred, but we never get them under control."
Control. We like to have nature under control, and there's some justification for that. Nature is amoral. Nature doesn't care. The snake doesn't stop and think, "Oh -- but it's so cute!" before eating the kangaroo mouse.
"I'm interested in how, these days, we're unhinged from the natural world," Chalmers points out, as I finish my tea. "It's easy to feel connected to the natural world by picking up a warm, fuzzy puppy, but that really isn't the natural world. Dogs are domesticated. We feed them other animals, but the animals are chopped up and put into cans first. The truth is these life-and-death struggles happen all around us, all the time. And, in some ways, the very beginning of our desire to be civilized is a desire to be out of the food chain ourselves."
I resist the urge to ask her if she wants to go grab some lunch.
Ray Isle, a 1993-95 Stegner fellow in creative writing, is a senior editor at Wine & Spirits magazine in New York.
