Brandon Ballengée: Sea of Vulnerability

Exhibiting Artist Brandon Ballengée Featured on State of the Arts

September 14 – November 4, 2017

International artist, biologist and environmental educator Brandon Ballengée opens the Rowan University Art Gallery season with Sea of Vulnerability, a series of trans-disciplinary installations, assemblages, and mixed media artworks inspired by his ecological field and laboratory research that offer dramatic visual representations of biological species that are in decline, threatened, or already lost to extinction. The exhibit is on display from September 14 – November 4, 2017.

Concurrently, RUAG presents Ballengée’s light emitting sculpture Love Motel for Insects, in partnership with Freedom Prep Charter School and Virtua Camden, at 1000 Atlantic Ave. in Camden NJ. Standing 12’ high by 15’ long, Love Motel for Insects is an ongoing series of public art installations intended to construct situations between humans and arthropods. The works use ultra-violet lights on large sculpted canvases to attract flying moths and create an opportunity for public interactions with nocturnal arthropods, which are not often seen.

Join us on Wednesday, September 13, at 7p.m. for a Bug Watch. Brandon Ballengée will be on-site for a brief discussion and bug identification session with visitors. The installation is on view from September 14 through March 2018.

Other works in the gallery exhibit include a 9 foot high tower of 26,162 preserved specimens representing 370 species of fish and other aquatic organisms collected from the Gulf Coast impacted by the BP oil spill; an installation of foliage representative of the lush forest habitat of South America; video of a Tennessee warbler that collided with a mirrored glass window in the Wall Street area of Manhattan; larger-than-life size photographs of chemically “clearing and staining” terminally deformed frogs found in nature; and a series of cut images of missing animals from historic prints and publications printed at the time in history when the depicted species became extinct.

The exhibition, with public and educational programming, serves as a platform for discussions that explore our local and global environment, understand its biodiversity, and consider the interface of art and science.

Ballengee's work is presented courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and the artist. Support for programming at Rowan University Art Galleries has been made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Exhibitions and gallery programming are free and open to the public.