Trash Bugs

These bugs were made for other projects and I was excited to bring them back to life for this exercise. Having a blank background felt reductive to the ensemble, so I went outside to my alley by the recycling bins. For some reason, having the context felt like it gave the ensemble more life. Staging each piece in relation to one another in a composition that felt like it had life or forward moving action, was a challenge, but it was a useful practice in composition and utilizing the individual physical allowances of each piece. For me, the trash bugs evoked a sense that the alley was a dynamic environment. Even though that is already true when considering how many actual insects and animals probably frequent that location, it’s not necessarily visually evident. I think the trash bugs help illustrate the lively network of not just bugs and scavengers, but also the debris they eat and scavenge, the bacteria and fungi that break down and disperse the decay. I recall a section of Vibrant Matter where Jane Bennet describes her very book as a lively assemblage “this book also emerged from the confederate agency of many striving macro- and microactants: from “my” memories, intentions, contentions, intestinal bacteria, eyeglasses, and blood sugar, as well as from the plastic computer keyboard, the bird song from the open window, or the air or particulates in the room...here on the page is an animal-vegetablemineral-sonority cluster with a particular degree and duration of power...an assemblage.”

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