Perspectives: Brandon Ballengée
Integrating art and biology, Brandon Ballengée centers loss in the age of the Anthropocene
Most small boys dream of growing up to buy a Corvette, or a horse, or mansion with a swimming pool. Brandon Ballengée wanted his own nature reserve. “I wanted a sanctuary, where species could kind of live without being disrupted,” he said, recalling his early fascination for the intricate worlds of the wild. “I was really interested in how [animals] worked.”
His parents indulged him, allowing him to keep enough aquariums that they relegated them from his upstairs room to the basement, worried that the ceiling might fall through under the weight. “I had a kind of wet lab,” he said. “It got more and more complex, and I’d do research—even in like high school—trying to figure out how to breed exotic night fish from the Amazon and stuff. Yeah, I had a pet electric eel when I was like, fifteen.”
It was the vanishing frogs of the 1990s, though, that sealed Ballengée’s fate as a Guggenheim-awarded artist/biologist/conservation activist. “Those first big studies about amphibians disappearing … that just really hit, just really resonated,” he said. “That was my first kind of awareness about our loss of biodiversity.”
Thirty years later, Ballengée’s body of artistic work could be described as a sustained study on this loss. His most recent exhibition at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, in fact, was titled The Age of Loneliness—a phrase borrowed from scientist and environmental philosopher Edward O. Wilson, who used it to describe the mass extinction event of our current Anthropocene era.
Distinct and powerful in their amalgamation of science and visual arts, Ballengée’s work draws as much on human curiosity as it does on nostalgia and empathy. His sculptural installation Collapse acts as a tribute—a symbolic sacred burial in the shape of a pyramid—to 26,162 preserved specimens collected from the Gulf Coast, illustrating an eerie peek into the incomprehensible world of the Gulf’s aquatic ecosystems. Empty jars throughout symbolize species that are in decline, or already extinct.
“Those first big studies about amphibians disappearing … that just really hit, just really resonated,” he said. “That was my first kind of awareness about our loss of biodiversity.”
His collection, Frameworks of Absence, extends this conversation in an exploration of how to exhibit absence. Perusing old field guides, published before the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon became extinct, he wondered: “How do you give visual form to something that doesn’t exist anymore?” He started by blacking them out, using Super Ultra Black Japanese micro pins. “I would finish, and you have these beautiful like ebony shapes, like silhouettes, and like—well, that’s not really a negative,” he said. “It’s another positive.” He tried again, imitating the strategy of artist Robert Rauschenberg, who erased a drawing by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. “It left this kind of ghostly image, and I was like ‘Okay I’m gonna try that.’” But the ghost that remained still felt like something. “At some point, out of frustration, I just kind of cut one out and held it up. And then I was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s absence.’”
Ballengée described this process of trial and error as “so much like science.” “It’s like, ninety-nine things don’t work, and suddenly you get a result where you’re just like, ‘wow’.”
His most recent project, titled Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf, concerns the 2010 BP Oil Spill—the event that brought Ballengée and his work to Louisiana, where he moved full time with his wife Aurore and son in 2015. The first iteration of Ghosts is a collection of chemically-cleared and -stained specimens collected in the Gulf following the oil spill—species that are endangered and described by the artist as “apparitions”. Another branch of the project, titled La Mer des Enfants Perdus, is a series of radiographs of specimens that have not been documented in the Gulf since 2005, some as long ago as 1950. The most recent component of this project, though, are Ballengée’s crude oil paintings—for which he uses oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill as paint in portraits of these lost species.
As is often the case in science, such projects as these rarely offer the satisfaction of a clean conclusion—particularly as our world continues down the path of environmental crisis. “What I find is, it’s really hard to come up with a final conclusion to what you’re trying to say on this topic,” said Ballengée. As a result, many of these projects are ongoing.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. An important component of Ballengée’s work is education and activism. This can take the form of workshops hosted through his community-based residency with A Studio in the Woods—which educates the coastal communities of Plaquemines Parish on the Gulf’s disappearing species; or it can take the form of the bi-annual BioBlitz hosted at Ballengée’s nature reserve in Arnaudville.
Because, yes—his childhood dream came true.
“When we moved here, we found this little old house with nine acres of soybean fields,” he said of his reserve, Atelier de la Nature. “And immediately, we got out and started to take the soybeans out and just started to remediate the land, bring back the native species, build up the topsoil again and create different kinds of habitats.
“When we moved here, we found this little old house with nine acres of soybean fields,” he said of his reserve, Atelier de la Nature. “And immediately, we got out and started to take the soybeans out and just started to remediate the land, bring back the native species, build up the topsoil again and create different kinds of habitats.” So far, he and Aurore have planted over one thousand trees, created a wetland habitat, and planted two and a half acres of Cajun prairie grass. Recently, they were also able to purchase sixteen adjacent acres, expanding the reserve to twenty-five total. “It’s amazing how many creatures have already come back—the return of biodiversity happening right before our eyes.” On the property, he and Aurore regularly host volunteer events, workshops, and fundraisers—plus two annual festivals: The Fete de la Nature in the spring and the Halloween Art and Nature Festival in the fall.
“One of the takeaways I always try to talk to people about is how you really can [bring the nature back in]. I mean, it’s possible! You don’t have to be Elon Musk or Bill Gates to make a difference. Everything we do every day, in some small way, has an impact—and often even in big ways.”
Learn about Ballengée’s work at brandonballengee.com and about his nature reserve Atelier de la Nature at atelierdelanature.org.