Artist Jennifer Angus is installing her exhibit of insect art entitled “Arranging Nature” this week at MOSI in time for the opening on February 19th, 2011.
Jennifer Angus is a Canadian artist best known for her work featuring kaleidoscopic patterns composed of real insects. Some of her recent installations take inspiration from the Victorian era. For the past ten years, Jennifer has been creating installations composed of insects pinned directly to a wall in repeating patterns which reference both textiles and wallpaper. Jennifer says, “When viewers enter one of my installations, they are greeted with something they think they know, that is, a patterned wallpaper which could be in anyone's home. However, upon closer examination, they discover that it is entirely made up of insects! A tension is then created by the beauty one observes in the pattern and the apprehension we feel toward insects.”
Jennifer Angus, who teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin, became an amateur entomologist in the course of creating her “Victorian Fancy” series of dollhouses and installations. She builds scenes of perfect domestic felicity, but all the patterns on the walls, floors and furniture are arrangements of beautiful insects, and all the characters in the dollhouses are insects, too — electric-green beetles from Thailand, locusts from French Guiana with spectacular wings of purple and blue, striped weevils, polka-dot weevils, leaf mimics, white cicadas and frog-legged beetles that look like their name. “I wanted to create a pattern that suggests a domestic space,” she said, “but of course the one thing people don’t want in their house is insects.”
