‘Spineless Wonders’

Softball-sized dust mites. A
“skeleton” of a praying mantis. Giant bronze flatworms. Fashionable handbags with squids. Artwork created with the help of a Madagascar hissing cockroach. These are all part of the ‘Invertebrates as Inspiration’ exhibit showing at the Atrium Gallery.

LEWISTON — When gallery director Robyn Holman issued her call for artworks — all pieces which draw inspiration from invertebrates — she worried they’d be uniform and pretty.

“I thought I would get a million dragonflies,” Holman said.

Then pictures of paintings, sculptures and other media began arriving in her mail. They included a bronze image of a flatworm, hydras crafted from shredded tires, a praying mantis with a bicycle seat for a head and a compost exhibit, evolving on the spot by living, digesting earthworms.

Holman found herself enjoying a kind of riches.

“We tried to get as many kinds of expression as possible,” said Holman, director of exhibitions at Lewiston-Auburn College’s Atrium Art Gallery.

The title of the exhibit:  “Spineless Wonders: Invertebrates as Inspiration.”

The point of the show, which opened Sept. 8 and continues until Dec. 18, is to combine art and science. Holman figured that science folks might be interested in the insights of the artists. She also hoped artists would use the forms, figures or behaviors of invertebrates as a point of departure.

In many cases, the artists were already on their way.

Californian Steven Kutcher submitted a work that he created with the help of a Madagascar hissing cockroach. For a piece he named “Fly on the Wall,” he painted the live roach’s feet and belly with pigment and loosed it onto blank paper. As it crawled, he moved the page.

The result resembles a Jackson Pollock reinterpreted by a cockroach.  He’s done other works with beetles, bees, butterflies and moths.

“People always say a work gets more valuable when the artist dies,” he said. “I have a box
of dead artists to prove it.”

An entomologist who has worked as a bug wrangler on dozens of Hollywood movies, including “Spider Man” and “G-Force,” Kutcher came up with the method while working on a piece in the 1980s for Steven Spielberg. The director tasked Kutcher with helping a fly leave footprints.

He figured it out and recalled the secret while experimenting with paints a few years ago.

“I know it really has a lot of potential,” Kutcher said in a phone interview from his home in Arcadia, Calif. “I’ve kind of created a new language.”

The piece joins about 100 others, half from Maine.

Holman has also integrated the exhibit with Lewiston’s Stanton Bird Club, which is planning a pair of events that would help people see invertebrates in nature.

The kind of interdisciplinary work is a Lewiston-Auburn College specialty. It spreads to Holman herself. Though the gallery director has an art background, Holman maintains bee hives outside her home in Auburn. “I’m very interested in science,” she said.

Other eyes might find grotesqueness among the images in her gallery. Holman looked with wonder at each one, from the video of the cockroach being swallowed by a frog to the webcam atop the compost bin.

“There they are,” she said, lifting the lid to the bin and peering and inside. “Eating away.”

[email protected]

“Spineless Wonders: Invertebrates as Inspiration” celebrates the diversity of species for the 2009 bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species.” Invertebrates make up a vast group that includes worms, insects and their larvae, spiders, jellyfish, shellfish such as crabs and shrimp, squid and more. An estimated 97 percent of all animal species are invertebrates. Paintings, prints, sculpture, poetry, video and work in clay, metal, fiber, glass, wood and stone by 56 artists from around the country are all part of this multidimensional exploration of the invertebrate world.