Pinkies, Food Chain, and Sex
June 1 – July 1, 2000
Critically-acclaimed photographer, Catherine Chalmers, explores the food chain of life in explicit form through her large-scale color images of animals eating animals. Her dramatic photos with vibrant, brilliant colors are irresistibly shocking as she captures, the details of a frog eating a praying mantis, and then a praying mantis eating a caterpillar, and then a caterpillar, eating a tomato. You want to look away, but you just can’t. Chalmers raises all the animals she uses and maintains a mini-ecosystem within her Manhattan apartment. Her book, Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, and Prey is due out in May, 2000, and is published by Aperture.
Catherine Chalmers holds a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She has exhibited her artwork around the world, including MoMA P.S.1; MASSMoCA; The Drawing Center, New York, Kunsthalle Vienna; Today Art Museum, Beijing; among others. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post, ArtNews and Artforum. She has been featured on PBS, CNN, NPR, and the BBC. Two books have been published on her work: FOOD CHAIN (Aperture 2000) and AMERICAN COCKROACH (Aperture 2004). Her video “Safari” received a Jury Award (Best Experimental Short) at SXSW Film Festival in 2008. In 2010 Chalmers received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2015 she was awarded a Rauschenberg Residency. In 2018 she created the course “Art & Environmental Engagement” and taught it at Stanford University. Her video “Leafcutters” won Best Environmental Short at the 2018 Natourale Film Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany; in 2019 it won the Gil Omenn Art & Science Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She lives in New York City.