SQUASH THEM!

3”x3” Chemigram Lumen Print
Subject Matter: Shoe Print and Spotted Lantern Fly

“SQUASH!” is a project that encourages you to squash all spotted lantern flies by any means necessary.

Why? These gorgeous little insects are destroying our local forests and ecosystems. They are an invasive species from Asia, currently located in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, rapidly spreading further through the USA into DE, CT, RI, MD, NY, VA and beyond. They are flourishing and populating at an exponential rate because they have no natural predators. It is up to us humans to squash them all, stop their destruction and save our forests. Environmental and Governmental Organizations have been encouraging the public to “squash” these bugs since their discovery in PA in 2014.

I’ve made hundreds of these 3”x3” cameraless “squash” prints with spotted lantern flies I’ve collected at each stage of the insects life cycle. In each I have physically squashed the insect (sometimes even still alive) under glass and exposed it to the sun to create my artwork. Each piece took over 3 hours to create. Below you can see them exhibited as a site-specific installation at Southern VT Arts Center in Manchester, VT in September 2022. When exhibited you can see a community coming together to stop the spread of this invasive insect by squashing them under foot.

To further the impact of the message of this project I also worked in the darkroom on larger experimental silver gelatin prints using photograms of Spotted Lantern Flies and imagery of forests from both 35mm film or paper pinhole negatives. Each of these artworks depicts the destruction that the spotted lantern flies are causing to the environment as they suck the sweet sap out of trees and urinate it back out all over them, causing black sooty mold to grow and cover the trunks and forest floors. In time the trees are weakened and will die.

“Sticky and Stained”, 2022
8x10 Silver Gelatin Print, framed in a Silver Maple tee cross section

“Invaded” , 2022
8x10 Silver Gelatin Print

“Overwhelmed”, 2022
8x10 Silver Gelatin Print

“SQUASH!” site-specific installation

TECHNIQUE: Chemigram Lumen Print (mixed media cameraless photography)

PROCESS: The process of creating these works mimics the action in a very literal and almost comical way. Each artwork is made by stomping on a piece of darkroom photo paper with a chemical-painted shoe and then physically squashing a spotted lantern fly between that photographic paper and glass. The guts spill out. A lumen print is created out of the flies death.

MATERIALS: Fiber Based Darkroom Paper, Spotted Lantern Flies, Photo Chemistry (Developer, Stop Bath, Fixer)

DIMENSIONS: Each individual piece is 3”x3”

EDITION: Each artwork is an edition of 1.

CREATION DATE: 2021 - 2022

Personal Notes + Feelings: As an environmentalist, it feels awful to purposefully kill something in nature - it seems so wrong - but we’re being urged to do so by local environmental and governmental organizations. Pursuing this project is as much of a cheeky call to action as it is a meditation about my feelings on the topic and the many nuanced layers it brings up about invasive species, naturalization of species, what it means to belong, racism, death, etc.

“Sticky and Stained”

TECHNIQUE: Combination of Photogram, Negative Enlargements, and Chemigram

DIMENSIONS: 8” x 10”

EDITION: Unique. 1/1

CREATION DATE: 2022

“Invaded”

TECHNIQUE: Combination of Photogram and Negative Enlargements

DIMENSIONS: 8” x 10”

EDITION: Unique. 1/1

CREATION DATE: 2022

“Overwhelmed”

TECHNIQUE: Combination of Photogram and Pinhole Photography