Brandon Ballengée, “Call of the Void”

By David S. Rubin

Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, California

Exhibition continues Through June 15, 2024

May 18, 2024

Brandon Ballengée, “RIP Quagga: After Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert,” 1889/2024, artist cut and burnt lithograph, ashes and etched funerary urn, 30 x 23 1/8”. All images courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles / Dallas / Seoul.

Brandon Ballengée is a Louisiana-based artist and biologist who believes that creativity and education are the best routes to increasing awareness of environmental threats to the future of humanity and the planet we inhabit. As a biologist, he has conducted field and laboratory research into the deformities and population declines of amphibians and, more recently, into the detrimental impact of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill on the region’s fish. As an artist, he has been exhibiting clever and provocative installations about these problems that pull us in through their aesthetic appeal, yet ultimately enlighten us about the near or full extinctions of various species. It is a situation that has been accelerating in recent years, but about which most of us are probably uninformed or even apathetic.

In his current exhibition “Call of the Void,” he provides a wealth of information that might be tedious to consume if presented as a conventional scientific report. Instead, by using innovative formats for heightening public awareness, he treats us to a visually stimulating lesson in contemporary ecology that will likely stick in the memory of anyone who sees it.

Brandon Ballengée, ”RIP Western Black Rhinoceros: After Joe Kubert,” 1972/2024, artist cut an burnt bronze age comic book cover, 21 x 18”

In the main gallery, Ballengée provides a global historical perspective on his subject with “Frameworks of Absence,” an installation that serves as mausoleum of sorts for extinct species, including eight birds, three frogs, a tortoise, a butterfly, a bear, a rhinoceros, a zebra, and a fox. Inspired by a quotation from the American philosopher and naturalist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) which states that we do more to protect fine art than we do animal life, the installation is solemn and reverential, yet eye-opening for its documentation of extinctions that occurred from as long ago as 1662 to as recently as 2011.

Playing off of Leopold’s commentary, Ballengée collected fine art prints and one comic book cover depicting various extinct species while they were still in existence, and methodically excised the creatures from the imagery with a razor blade. He then ritualistically burned the extracted sections and placed the ashes in glass funerary urns etched with ‘RIP’ and the name of the species. Each individual shrine consists of an altered print housed in a frame appropriate to its time period, with a corresponding urn mounted beneath it. In one corner of the installation, a monitor playing scenes of the burning ritual rests on the floor like a “Day of the Dead” altar, with animal bones and skulls laid before it. At the front desk, visitors can scroll through a “Book of the Dead,” a digital equivalent of didactic wall labels that provides information about each species and the details of its extinction.

Brandon Ballengée, “Abyss,” 2024, 67 jars of preserved deep sea specimens, preservative solution, glass, and LEDs, 80 x 121 x 49” (overall); “Ghosts of the Gulf,” 2014, giclée prints on handmade Japanese watercolor paper

To shift our focus to the present moment, Ballengée has filled the smaller rear gallery with an installation that calls attention to the fish that either perished or are on the verge of disappearing as a result of the aforementioned oil spill. Dominating the space is “Abyss” (2024), a large sculpture composed of glass jars filled with preserved specimens of deep-sea fish, giant isopods, squid, and other species whose survival is jeopardized by deepwater mining, along with some empty jars that represent those that have already vanished. Stacked in grids separated by sheets of safety glass, the jars metaphorically suggest isolation beds in a hospital intensive care unit. Lining the walls on opposite sides of the space are several giclée prints from an earlier series, “Ghosts of the Gulf” (2014). These haunting images, which look like colored x-rays of fish with splashes of oil inside their bodies, were made by chemically cleaning and staining species collected in the Gulf after the spill and then photographing or radiographing them.

Brandon Ballengée, “Love Motels for Insects: Monarch Version,” 2021, outdoor light sculpture shaped after a Monarch butterfly, aluminum, stainless tell mesh, UV LED lights, and invited insects, 94 x 64 x 44”

Not satisfied to call attention to a problem without finding at least a partial solution, Ballengée has installed “Love Motels for Insects: Monarch Version” (2021) in a native plant garden located in the gallery courtyard. Since 2001, the artist has placed his “love motels” in various locations around the world. Constructed from metal shaped into a giant butterfly, and illuminated at night by ultraviolet lighting that attracts insects, each of these sculptures functions as a breeding ground for those tiny creatures that may be annoying, but upon which we are dependent for our continued existence.

David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Artillery, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.