Catherine Chalmers

The artist Catherine Chalmers creates photographs, videos, and sculpture of insects and rodents in order to investigate and reconsider their place within our culture and to explore the adverse relationship humans have with them. Inspired by science, Chalmers's work is both appealing and grotesque, with the artist depicting her typically repulsive subjects in everyday human poses: mice kissing, ants carrying flowers, and cockroaches in the bathtub. In her series Executions, these creatures are depicted hanging from nooses, highlighting our cavalier attitudes about exterminatination. "Most of our scientific energy around cockroaches is spent devising a better way to kill them," Chalmers says. "Somewhere through the march of time we've placed certain animals and insects in nature on another level. They've been walled off." In her work, Chalmers attempts to break down this wall and show these creatures in a new light.

Chalmers's work has been exhibited at institutions such as MoMA PS1, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Kunsthalle Basel, and Aperture has published two books of her work: Food Chain (2000) and American Cockroach (2004).