My work is really about creating a moment of wonder.
I want people to walk into the exhibition and say, "Wow!"
I know a lot of people get shocked when they find out there's
literally thousands of insects
pinned to the wall, but they go in and they're finding the beauty in it.
Doesn't matter what your age is, what your ethnicity,
we all have an experience, whether it's good or bad, with insects,
and just realizing how remarkable they are, how beautiful they can be.
I am Colleen Evans and I am the Director of Natural Sciences
at the Staten Island Museum and I am an entomologist.
We have one of the world's largest collections of cicadas.
There is about 36,000 cicadas.
So they are the life's work of William
T Davis, who was a cicada taxonomist in the early 20th century.
He was "the guy" during that time period that you would contact
if you wanted to know something about cicadas.
So I had been following Jennifer Angus since about 2015 or so.
She tends to use a lot of cicadas in her work,
so it seemed just like a natural fit.
I'm Jennifer Angus. I'm an artist.
I create installations with insects, and I'm really interested
in drawing attention to how important insects are.
Now in 2021, the brood ten cicadas came out,
and it is this miraculous phenomenon.
William T. Davis named those cicadas
that come out every 13 or 17 years, Magicicada.
So it was really appropriate
to have an exhibition that focused on cicadas this year.
You know, the Staten Island Museum came about in the Victorian era.
And Victorians were obsessed with death.
Victorian homes had taxidermy.
They had bell jars full of dead things.
And so I feel like using dead things in a Victorian setting feels natural.
They collected souvenirs and then they displayed them.
That whole aesthetic does have this oppressive but overwhelming feeling.
No empty space is allowed.
The walls are made with a insect infused paint called lac.
These insects produce a resin that creates this pinky purple color.
And I thought it would be really appropriate
to have an insect colorant upon the walls.
Along all of the windows, there are these wonderful
insect jellies that she created with insects suspended inside.
I also designed the curtains that cover the windows,
and so depending on the time of day, you see that there are these
Victorian characters looking up at cicadas and to me,
that's one of the most special parts of the exhibition.
In the cabinet of curiosities, which has 170 drawers,
typically I position the insects so that it appears they're standing on their rear
legs, human-like, to really create a kind of empathy for them.
If we thought about them as having families or going to work,
of living lives parallel to our own, then we might not be so quick
to stomp on them or blast them with the can of raid.
They also do a lot for us.
There's pieces of the exhibit that are dedicated,
you know, to decomposers and to pollinators, all these different
ecological functions that insects have that are important to us.
But perhaps the most important role is
is that they are an important link in the food chain.
So I'd like to show the things that we frankly will lose if insects disappeared.
I think William T.
Davis would really like the exhibit and I think he would find the beauty of it.
And I think what Jennifer's work is very good at is creating something
beautiful out of something that people aren't expecting to be beautiful.
People who have never darken the door of an art
museum will come to see big insects.
And I really hope that people will be thinking about insects
differently to realize just how amazing insects are.