A Welcome from Dr. Georgiana Mendell (representing the exhibit's corporate sponsor, BIOMANUX)

I will now cede the podium to our exhibit designer, Miss Christine Chin, who will talk to you about some particulars of the artifacts presented today. But while she is making her way up here, please take a few minutes to view the time lapse images of the natural growth patterns of the long-stemmed Vernomanus.

Exhibition Designer: Christine Chin

Hi. I’m Christine Chin, the designer of this exhibit. I’m honored to have the opportunity to design this exhibit on behalf of Biomanux. This is an especially exciting opportunity for me, since my work as a visual artist is coincidentally very related to the work that I have done on this exhibit.

I’d like to give you a little background on my past work. I have been interested in the interaction between the body and the landscape for many years. I feel that I can trace my own past in the landscapes that I have inhabited. I grew up New Jersey, deep in the strip malls and residential neighborhoods of Suburbia. My first trip out west was a geology trip in college, and my eyes were just riveted to the landscape as soon as we left the skyline of Las Vegas. I had never seen so much horizon before. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in Literature and a minor in photography, I moved to upstate New York, which was yet another whole new landscape to incorporate—rolling green hills, lush gorges and lakes. I experienced it as rather intimate landscape, one that I could relate to and make my own. I could build an illusion of connection with the landscape. In my earlier work in Ithaca, New York, the figure fits into and echoes elements of the landscape. Rock begins to look like skin, hair like water, hands like wood. Later on, I started creating performative self-portrait work. In a series of pictures connected by a horizon, I captured elusive, ritualistic performances. These performances dealt with moving into, out of, and within the landscape, with names like “Disappearance,” “Emergence,” “Flight,” and “Dance.” I used long exposures and trailing cloth to create a sense of movement. The figure seems to fade in and out, almost becoming an atmospheric element.

When I came to Indiana a year and a half ago, it was an entirely new experience of landscape to incorporate. There is a sense of openness to the Midwest landscape that is reminiscent of the west. But this is also a working landscape—privately owned, agricultural. The fields change with the crops and the seasons-- a day’s work with a harvester and a whole new landscape is revealed. My early work was in concept very similar to the work I had done in Ithaca—self portrait, performative. The photograph becomes a record of an experience in landscape. In these images, though, the body disappears entirely—only the cloth that was trailing behind is captured on the film. At first glance, the cloth almost seems to be a part of the atmosphere, like an oddly shaped cloud. But the peculiarities of its movements hint at movements of the absent figure.

Last spring I began to paste small photographs into large paintings. My early paintings captured a performance in little photographs clustered along the horizon, like little buildings sticking up, cinematic in their sequencing. But later photographs moved onto physically incorporating the body into the landscape. My most successful one is the painting called “Growing Hands” where fists form the heads of long painted stems. The illusion of a very physical connection between body and landscape worked well. But the connection was not a comfortable connection—it is strange and uneasy. If you look at the painting as a landscape, it is a surreal, incomprehensible landscape. If you look at the painting as body, the arms are long, deformed, mutated. When I translated the painted “plants” back into photography, the result led me to the Vernomanus species. “Verno” means “green, growing” and “manus” is latin for hand.

This caused me to re-evaluate the way I was thinking about landscape and body. Instead of connection, this means of incorporating the body into landscape is uneasy, uncomfortable. And when I thought about it, my own relationship to the natural landscape is one of a visitor. Like most people in the US, my daily landscapes are my bedroom, my office, the supermarket parking lot. The natural landscape is a place I visit for relaxation and recreation.

I believe that this exhibit addresses the idea of most of us as strangers to the natural landscape. In some ways, this is ironic, in that we are biological organisms just like the organic and non-organic materials we generalize as landscape. The biotech company Biomanux is very concerned with this question of the unnatural separation between plant and animal form, and Vernomanus is an ideal species to address this, sharing many attributes of the plant world but yet taking a form that we tend to recognize as animal.

Another question that this exhibit asks us to consider is that the species VerNomanus has been in existence for 400 million years and is documented as living in your backyard—why haven’t you seen it before? When was the last time you really looked?

And to take this one step further—how do you know what the natural landscape looks like? Is it personal experience, or some other source? I know what the top of Mount Everest looks like, and what the Amazon rainforest looks like—or I think I do. Where does your knowledge of landscape come from—personal experience, photographs, your 5th grade biology text book, the natural history museum dioramas that take you from the primordial nutrient soup to the cave man in 200 yards?

Also, in an exhibit of this scope-- it stretches from the classic field of paleontology to the relatively recent field of genetic sequencing-- how do you evaluate the verity of the information you receive on a daily basis? It is virtually impossible to be an expert in your field, and in all of the others that you encounter. How do you deal with the uncertainty of information, whether it comes from scientists or an administration gearing up for war?

But fortunately, I can assure you that everything in this exhibit is authentic.