Sean Connaughty

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indoor living pod

Sean Connaughty 2012

indoor living pod | Media List

indoor living pod
Sean Connaughty 2012

Statement

Sean Connaughty 2012 branches, leaf debris, soil and plants. approx. 48x16x16"

a hollow shell branch construction with living elements.

Reviews

SINCE HUMAN BEINGS BEGAN TO MAKE ART before they
even called it "art", they've been using earth as material. As
"civilization" has progressed, though, creative use of such elemental
materials has transitioned to more man-made stuff, to the point where
today an artist can easily construct an entire work of art on a
computer. However, even as hide skins have been replaced by canvas and
natural pigments by synthetic paints, the attraction for some to create
beautiful things from nature endures still. Gardening and the art of
floral arranging are among the most obvious examples, but that's just
the beginning -- you could also include forms that work upon the human
body - tattoo art, for example. There's also the Japanese creative
tradition of bonsai cutting and cultivation, or, in more recent years,
the phenomenon of crop art. All are illustrative of the breadth of
possibilities for using living things to create art works.

In the Twin Cities, two artists stand out as exemplary of work in the form. Sean Connaughty has a painting background, but it's his pod structures and bigloos made out of snow which have gained him notoriety in recent years. But first, let's talk about Kate Casanova (once Connaughty's student), who is doing interesting things too, not only with plants but with fungus, and even insects.

The grotesque

Kate Casanova
describes herself as an "amateur naturalist." She grew up in northern
Minnesota, where her family owned sled dogs instead of a television. "My
visual vocabulary assembled itself from snake nests, rabbit's fur, and
icicles," she says in her artist statement.
That fascination with the natural world has led her to create work not
only inspired by living things but which also, more recently, actually
incorporates them into the form of her pieces.

A stunning example is a time lapse video she created, called Ornament,
which shows the back of Casanova's head, inhabited by three crabs
milling about in her French braided hair, gradually picking apart her
pristine hairstyle. It's a scene at once grotesque and beautiful;
Casanova's stillness throughout the process offers the busy creatures a
welcome that, while disconcerting, seems quite natural.

In September, Casanova showed another "living" piece, Mushroom Chair, as part of an exhibition at Anita Sue Kolman Gallery.
The work began with a chair Casanova bought at a thrift store, which
she had re-upholstered with pristine white fabric. Then, from the
substance of the chair Casanova grew pink oyster mushrooms, which she
purchased from a company in Washington State that sells spores. As the
mushrooms grew through the fabric, a green mold grew as well.

"Very often my inspirations start as something that doesn't relate to
art," she says. "From there they percolate in my head." In the case of
the mushroom chair - the work was sparked by her conception of a
striking image: a snowy white chair overtaken by pink mushrooms. In
order for Casanova to realize her vision, though, she had to deploy a
bit of science, researching and experimenting to find just the right
environment for such mushrooms to grow the way she wanted them. She has
to figure it out as she goes, because, as she says, "[this kind of work
is] uncharted territory."

The scientific particulars are interesting in themselves: Casanova
uses a humidifier and temperature controls to keep the chair at
precisely 80 degrees Fahrenheit and 80 percent humidity; the chair is
encased in glass to keep its environment stable. Eventually, she says
she hopes to grow mushrooms out of the seats of a car, so that the car
itself might become the encasement. That way, there "isn't anything
between me and the mushrooms that wouldn't already exist," she says.
______________________________________________________
Whether it's crabs crawling
through her hair, or growing fungi and mold in furniture, or an evening
of eating live insects, Casanova doesn't shy away from ugliness. She
embraces all aspects of the life cycle -- even its decay -- and shapes
it into something aesthetically satisfying, if not pretty.
______________________________________________________

There's an undeniable grotesqueness in Casanova's use of live
materials: whether it's crabs crawling through her hair, or growing
fungi and mold in furniture, or planning an evening of eating live
insects, as she will do this spring, Casanova doesn't shy away from
ugliness. Indeed, she embraces it, exploring all aspects of the life
cycle -- even its decay -- and shaping it into something aesthetically
satisfying, if not pretty. "We have tendency to romanticize nature," she
says. "We pick and choose what we like. I'm playing on that natural
tendency, that uneasy boundary where the reality of nature comes through
underneath."

Cycles of life and death

Like Casanova, Sean Connaughty uses living things to create his pods, which are nest-like structures made out of natural materials, often living, which are suspended in the air. A typical pod,
he says, starts with a loop, to which he then adds various materials:
buckthorn trees he acquires from city abatement, leaf debris, weeds from
the garden, stuff from the cracks in the sidewalk, etcetera.

Connaughty says that he's intrigued by the potential of the living
material, and the connection between animals and humans. The pods are,
after all, a kind of shelter: you can go inside them, no different from
an animal protecting itself against harsh weather. The living pods, when
first constructed, are still alive; you have to water them every day to
keep them that way. Connaughty mentions that some of the pods have had
problems, especially with bugs infesting them. He says the pods do
eventually die, but that he's been experimenting with keeping them alive
for longer periods of time, even indoors through the use of a misting
system. "I want to stretch out for as long as I can,"
he says.

But even as Casanova and Connaughty seek ways to stave off the
inevitable, they both artists embrace that eventual end as a part of the
artwork itself. Indeed, Casanova's selection of mushrooms as a material
is significant in that regard, symbolic of that duality and tension in
the natural life cycle. "Mushrooms seemed like the perfect organism,"
she says. "They aid in decay but also aid other organisms... they embody
life."

Her mushroom chair is an apt proxy for the human body: it, too,
flourishes in resplendent decay before being utterly, inescapably
destroyed.

Embracing the ephemeral

Part of what drew Connaughty to working with natural materials, he
says, stems from an experience soon after he finished graduate school.
He came back to the Twin Cities only to find that the artwork he had
entrusted to a friend for storage had been taken to the dump. After
that, Connaughty began to think about his work in a different way -- he
began to document everything, first of all, and also started working
with more intrinsically temporary materials. For example, for his snow bigloos (he credits the late Matt Zaun
as a collaborator), he creates igloo-like structures that will
inevitably melt. So, too, his pods are, by nature, transitory, never
intended to remain unchanged. "I guess there was some coming to terms
with that nature," he says of his more ephemeral pieces.

For her part, Casanova explains, "We're always searching for
immortality. There's something freeing in accepting that everything is
eventually going to die and be forgotten."

There's humility in both of the artists' work, a kind of courageous
equanimity in the face of intractable natural forces. Though both
Casanova and Connaughty manipulate living materials in various ways to
achieve their ends, their work belies a respect for that material, and
acquiescence to its nature that suggests a larger acceptance of the
futility of attempts at control, and a willingness to discover the
possibilities inherent in that fact.

by Sheila Regan

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Conceptual Artist

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