Revisiting Chicago

(Moon Jellyfish, Anna Peach, stills from video filmed at Shedd Aquarium Chicago, 1/ 2007)

I found myself spending day after day in museums on my last visit to Chicago. I had left myself a week to explore after I completed the installation in Sheboygan. I was so nervous about that installation due to the 20ft ceilings, but all ended up fine. Different than I had envisioned but fine. The Spirit house took on an octopus or squid like shape, due to it being in a group show and not being able to stretch lines out in all directions. So squid like it was. I have always had an interest in the “freaks of the sea” as I began calling them affectionately. I think it was part inspired by my first time snorkeling on Weh Island, off the Northern coast of Banda Ache, Sumatra. That first time looking under water brought me face to face with an octopus, a large cuttlefish, and a school of lionfish within five minutes. The later brought up memories of a scull and crossbones warning on the tank of the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, both a fortunate and timely recognition. It also began an ongoing preoccupation of mine. Simply put, I am interested in how we experience nature. How is it filtered, censored and recombined so that people can again relate to it.



In Chicago, I took an afternoon to revisit the Shedd, after milling about SAIC for an hour or two. I brought my video camera and simply filmed the lot. From the chaos of the diver feeding fish in the big tank, with air hose caught on the turtles fin, to the serene but otherwise ignored Moon Jellies that top my post. I thought about why a man sloshing around gasping for breath while conversing with the man on the p.a. system was drawing such a crowd…and why for only for a few minutes before turning attention elsewhere. I stayed for the whole event, and by doing so I got to see him hand feed sand colored rays the size of salad plates, that no one else seemed to care about. I thought about our diminishing attention span and the need to see it all.



I sat alone in a darkened space with the moon jellies. I sat there for an uncomfortable length of time. So long that staff members began to check on me to make sure I wasn’t up to something, like say learning or reflecting on something. It seems like more and more if you stop too long you are a vandal.

I went on to see the Field museum and stayed there an equally long time. I stood in the Big Island lava flow section to see if it would elicit some feeling of connection for me, and it did due to the blaring video of a familiar news reporter in a vintage broadcast of the 1980’s eruption. I went on to sit by a Spirit House, a long house, alone on an atoll, and later looked at the stuffed birds that I recognized from the paces I have stayed around the world. I had fed their relatives papaya near Timor and laid in hot sand to watch their babies hatch in the Cook Islands. It was all so strange to be here together again in such different circumstances, considering they were stuffed. It was all so structured, in a way that life in these places never is. It made me feel fortunate to have had these places play a role in my experience in this world. Even though it was such an alteration of my experiences, it was enough to make me want to stay. I wanted to tell someone that that bird sat on my shoulder, that it made me feel alive and not so threatening on their tiny atoll called Takutea, but then thought better of it. I left the museum grudgingly where I walked in the cold evening air all the way to Michigan Avenue, and stopped to watch the Canadian geese sleeping in Grant Park. As I walked I tried to think of someway to tell these things without having to say a word at all.