Leviathanic Allusion, a solo exhibition by Natasha van Netten at the fifty fifty arts collective in Victoria, BC. January 10 – January 15, 2019. Please scroll down for more images and to read a summery of this exhibition.
The Leviathanic Allusion exhibition is inspired by natural history displays, informational books, charts, graphs and specimens in natural history museums. The title comes from Herman Melville’s novel Mody Dick. It is the suggestion of something greater: as a spout on the ocean hints at something much larger below, so the work in this exhibition alludes to an underlying layer of meaning and information.
Featured in this exhibition is a large installation called Swarm. This installation contains just under 20,000, life-sized paper stand-ins for krill. These small, shrimp-like creatures gather in vast numbers called “clouds” or “swarms”, and it is at this point that whales feed on them. Even though krill are significantly smaller than whales, when they gather together in these giant swaths they can become larger than the whale itself.
