The flood of oil spreading in the Gulf set the backdrop for the Multispecies Salon in New Orleans. When news of oil plumes first reached Jacqueline Bishop, an artist who teaches at Loyola University, she was hardly surprised. For Bishop, the uninterrupted flood of oil was an actualization of her worst nightmares, the horrible environmental disaster she had long imagined.
Some five years earlier, she created Trespass, an uncanny illustration of disasters looming on future horizons. First exhibited in the months before Hurricane Katrina, this assemblage of flotsam and jetsam—baby shoes and birds’ nests, toys and balls of twine—contained aesthetic premonitions of the floating debris that were omnipresent after the storm.
When we first encountered Trespass in Bishop’s studio in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans, our visit became an opportunity for her to tell a circuitous story about how she found hope, without even going to look for it, in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010. In Bishop’s work, we found a cautious spirit searching through refuse, coalescing around specific figures, and then dancing away again on other lines of flight.
Coated in a black patina, a dark, glossy finish like crude oil, at first blush, from far away, Trespass seems to just be a collection of wreckage—a dreadful rendering of disaster. When viewed from the middle distance, it appears to shimmer and dance about like oil in water—moving in different directions, coalescing around a heterogeneous collection of objects. Scrutinizing this aqueous landscape at a close range, moving in even closer still, reveals that it is populated with hopeful figures.
If at a distance “Trespass” seems to be a uniform black morass—prefiguring Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil flood—closer inspection reveals colorful organisms hiding in the shadows. Mushrooms, seed pods, and birds’ eggs anchor hopes in living forms. Like a bird’s nest, built from scavenged detritus, “Trespass” nurtures hopeful dreams. The figural play of this assemblage works with shifts of scale: A sea slick with oil and wreckage, an unfathomable disaster when viewed from afar, contains anchoring points for hopeful desires that can be grasped on a molecular level. Zooming in reveals that when droplets merge together, when they grab hold of almost imperceptible figures, they generate dynamic coalescences. Panning back out reveals the dance of oil in water.
Further Reading
Kirksey, Eben et al. (2014) “Hope In Blasted Landscapes” in The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 31-39.
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