The Spinybacked Orbweaver

I'm in Florida at the moment

Beyond/In Western NY Biennial installation at the Burchfield Penney

As I previously mentioned, things have slowed down on the blog because I was busy for the last couple weeks installing the second incarnation of my Secondary Occupants Collected & Observed installation. I've never had this much space to work with so it ended up being the biggest thing I've done to date. The whole show at the Burchfield had a curatorial sub theme (apart from the theme of the Biennial) of architecture. I was reunited with my Ecologies of Decay partners J-M Reed and Dennis Maher along with Michael Beitz, Joe Bochynski, Karen Brummund, Kyle Butler, Carl Lee, and Jamie O'Neil. I'm biased but I think all of the work in the show is fantastic, I'll post some images of the other work soon. The opening on Sunday was great, there were over 1000 people in attendance. Thanks to everybody who came out and thanks to everyone at the Burchfield Penney for making it happen.

Installing

This week I'm installing my show at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, for the Beyond/In Western New York Biennial which opens on the 24th, 25th, and 26th of this month. I spent most of today putting hooks in the 28 foot ceiling. It was a bit unnerving to drive the extended lift across the space. The show will be a bigger version of Secondary Occupants Collected & Observed which I showed at Black & White Gallery in Brooklyn last Spring

Daily Book Graphics #446 / Common Spiders of the United States

©1961 / Design: Menten, Inc. / This is a Dover edition of a 1902 book. It is rare for me to find books about spiders (an interest of mine), so I was very happy to find this one a Rust Belt Books in Buffalo.

Coverage in Williamsburg Greenpoint News and Arts

My current show, at Black & White Project Space in Brooklyn, made "Trent's Top Gallery Picks" in Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts. The show is up until the end of May, I encourage everyone to go see it (especially you art writer types).

18th Century Spiders

This post on BibliOdyssey has some great insect and spider illustrations by August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof

"August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof (1705-1759) was a German descendent of Austrian nobility and showed an early aptitude for painting. Following an apprenticeship with his artist-uncle and further study at the Academy of Nuremberg, Rösel obtained an appointment at the royal court in Copenhagen painting portraits and miniatures."

The above makes much more sense when flipped:

Here are a couple of my own spider portraits from my To Know the Spiders project:

Kingdom of the Spiders

A little while a ago a friend gave me the DVD of William Shatner's 1977 movie Kingdom of the Spiders (my interest in spiders here.) I finally got around to watching it last night. I can't say it's a great movie, (actually pretty anti-climactic) but it does have a lot of classic Shatner overacting. The original poster for the film is amazing, I think I need to own it.

Daily Book Graphics #175 / Spiders

I was excited to find Spiders (1947) in a used bookstore last year, books about spiders are generally hard to come by, and this one has a number of nice color plates. I don't really like the cover, it seems odd to use a stylized illustration of a spider when the illustrations within the book are of such a high technical quality. This short book provides some general information about spiders and color illustrations of the more common British species. W.S. Bristowe (1901-1975), was a well known British arachnologist, and strangely he is also the person who discovered the true story of Anna Leonowens, the woman whose memoirs inspired the King and I, or so Wikipedia tells me. See my work about spiders here.

Daily Book Graphics #121 / Spiders

I love the typography on the cover. Unfortunately the interior of the book is unexceptional. Published in 1974 by National Geographic. For my work on spiders go here.

Daily Book Graphics #19 / How to Know the Spiders

This book was a major inspiration for my To Know the Spiders project (now you can be one of the rare people who get my project title reference). This edition is from 1978. The book provides keys to Families and common genera. It is part of The Pictured Key Nature Series (you can find them on Amazon). I really should make an effort to collect them all, the covers are all brilliant.

Monographie der Spinnen

These look much better when you click to enlarge.

BibliOdyssey has a post on the recently digitized Monographie der Spinnen / Monographia Aranearum' (Monograph of Spiders) by Carl Wilhelm Hahn (1786-1835), a German zoologist and artist. The book was issued in installments between 1820 and 1836. you can see the whole thing on the University of Heidelberg's website, here. I like the inclusion of an illustration showing the actual size.

Get Yer Freak On

I photographed these spiders in the act of mating. As you can see in close-up picture, their jaws are locked, and the male (left) has his pedipalps (read below), poking all around her body. Here is how Wikipedia breaks down the process:

Sperm transmission from male to female occurs indirectly. When a male is ready to mate, he spins a web pad upon which he discharges his seminal fluid. He then dips his pedipalps (also known as palpi), the small, leg-like appendages on the front of his cephalothorax, into the seminal fluid, picking it up by capillary attraction. Mature male spiders have swollen bulbs on the end of their palps for this purpose, and this is a useful way to identify the sex of a spider in the field. With his palps thus charged he goes off in search of a female. Copulation occurs when the male inserts one or both palps into the female's genital opening, known as the epigyne. He transfers his seminal fluid into the female by expanding the sinuses in his palp. Once the sperm is inside her, she stores it in a chamber and only uses it during the egg-laying process, when the eggs come into contact with the male sperm for the first time and are fertilized; this may be why the vivipary has never evolved in spiders.

Shortly after I took this photograph they separated. The male was lucky to get out alive.

Louise Bourgeois and Me

I went to see the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Guggenheim when I was in NYC week before last. My favorite Bourgeois work is, of course, her giant bronze spiders. I've previously mentioned on this blog that I thought some clever critic should make some connection between my spider faces and her faceless spiders. I'm tempted to go and hang one of my banners on one of her sculptures, it would be something to leave the Guggenheim in handcuffs. In any case, this is what that might look like:

Updated (but not finished) To Know the Spiders page here.