Brandon Ballengée: Call of the Void

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. The value that has accrued to illustrations by Audubon and by extension, collected and preserved images and art works in general, is placed in contrast to the relatively low value placed on vulnerable species, whose decline and disappearance is often invisible to the majority of people. There is also a formal operation at play, in which the field on which the images are made is perforated and presented with the wall visible through the work. This void, which repeats throughout the history of modern art from Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases to Lee Lozano’s choice to absent herself from the male-dominated New York art world, contains multitudes of metaphor and affect.

Alongside the Frameworks, we are also presenting a work titled Abyss. A stacked, serial sculpture composed of glass jars arranged in stacked grids separated by sheets of safety glass. Many, but not all, of the jars contain preserved specimens of deep-sea fish, giant isopods, squid and other species; species currently being put at risk from deepwater mining. Like the Frameworks, empty jars stand in for already missing, potentially extinct species.

On a more hopeful note, a sculpture from Ballengée’s series Love Motels for Insects is installed amidst a native plant garden, created in collaboration with Artemisia Nursery, in the VSF courtyard. The sculpture constructs a situation between humans and arthropods, using ultraviolet lights to attract nocturnal, pollinating insects.

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