Most exhibiting artists’ gallery instructions are fairly straightforward: mount the painting at this height, install the sculpture using these fasteners, and so on. For an exhibit currently on display at Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Matthijs Munnik’s instructions are a bit unconventional: they include a protocol for maintaining mutant C. elegans nematodes in petri dishes. Jennifer Angus’s include a request to preserve stray antennae, wings, and other specimens. And Ivana Adaime-Makac’s include how to replenish meticulously arranged ornamental and edible plant matter as it is consumed by house crickets.
“All Around Us,” curated by Ali Momeni, urges viewers to appreciate animals we’re largely conditioned to disregard, or worse—detest, fear, swat, kill. With projected video, glass sculpture, and dioramas, Momeni and the other exhibiting artists remind us that insects and arachnids outnumber humans by orders of magnitude and that their ecological significance cannot be ignored.
They’re beautiful to boot, Angus ...
