VSF presents Call of the Void, our first solo exhibition with Louisiana-based visual artist, biologist, and environmental educator, Brandon Ballengée. Following group exhibitions with his mentors, Helen and Newton Harrison at VSF LA and Frieze LA, this exhibition will highlight the breadth of the artist’s elegant and rich transdisciplinary practice. Ballengée creates artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. The work often deals with extinction and the consequences of pollution and extractive uses of natural resources.
In his best known series, Frameworks of Absence, Ballengée cites a famous edict of Aldo Leopolf, an American philosopher and naturalist most active in the early 20th century: “We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.” To create the Frameworks, Ballengée collects historic prints and illustrations of plant and animal life, carefully removes only the representations of now-extinct species with a razor blade, frames the altered print in a manner that correlates to the aesthetic preferences of the time of the original image, and cremates the paper remains removed from the illustration to display in an urn alongside this portrait of lost species in absentia.
In Ballengée’s work the absence of the excised animal operates along narrative, formal, and political vectors simultaneously. There is, on the one hand, a very straightforward operation underlying these works - The viewer is presented with a clear visual representation of loss and absence. The original prints that Ballengée alters are often iconic, high value art objects in and of themselves - images meant to be conserved, not altered.
