Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden
By John Rohrbach,
Senior Curator of Photographs, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
More Than This, 2015
85.15 x 43.25 inches
Dye coupler lenticular
Photograph, courtesy of the artist, Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, and Moody Gallery, Houston.
Dornith Doherty’s digital collages, made with X-ray images of thousands of seeds she captured using on-site research equipment, are a more intimate exploration of individual seeds stored in these crucial collections. This image shows more than 4,800 individual seeds, a number that is not sufficient to save a species from extinction. Color shifts in this and other lenticular works in the exhibition, between green to brown or green to blue, refer to the process of drying and freezing involved in cryogenic preservation.
In the summer after I finished second grade, my mother told my siblings and me that we each would be required to raise a vegetable of our choice in the family garden. It was her way of instilling in us her love of gardening, while also teaching us responsibility. I chose corn. We lived in Connecticut, so I didn’t have to think much about watering. Just plant, weed once or twice, and pick. I quickly came to enjoy watching the stalks grow tall, and then harvesting and shucking the ears when the cooking water was about to boil.
Now, 50 years later, I spend much of my waking hours in an office. But still, each turn of the calendar year unleashes the urge to peruse seed catalogues in preparation for my own small backyard vegetable garden. I meditate on whether to test new varieties or rely on what version I know will cope best against North Texas’s prolonged summer heat and sudden deluges.
We have been hearing a lot about global warming these days—about how storms and droughts are getting more severe, how species are being lost at an alarming rate, and how some places with a modicum of water may well have substantively less in the future. If insects, blight, or unexpected flooding do in my green beans or tomatoes, I don’t have to worry. I have a local farmer’s market and multiple grocery stores to fall back on. The vegetables I get through these sources may not taste quite the same, but I don’t have to worry about starving. Yet recently I came to recognize that even those food sources are not so secure.
In July 2017, I encountered a sobering article in The New York Times Magazine about scientists’ ongoing efforts to save our planet’s diminishing biodiversity. The article opened with a description of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an internationally funded facility set deep within an icy mountain near the North Pole. The facility holds more than one-third of the world’s plant genera, including 160,000 varieties of rice alone. Dornith Doherty was well ahead of me. She had learned about Svalbard just after it opened in 2008, and since then had come to recognize that it was just one of 1,400 such seed vaults around the world. A descendent of the Irish diaspora brought by the potato blight that hit Europe in the mid-1840s, she felt deep connection to seed banking, and to the recognition that such vaults are crucial backstops to disaster. Archiving Eden is her response.
Doherty’s clean documentary photographs of seed collection, sorting, and storage give me vivid entry into the world of seed banks, and to the frightening effects brought by what scientists have taken to calling the Anthropocene era. They remind me that saving our biodiversity is the work of thousands of volunteers and
professional scientists. They also show me the remarkable range of the world’s facilities, from the 100-year-old wooden drawers holding the barley collection at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St. Petersburg, Russia, to the cleanly lit steel-shelved laboratories and storage facilities run by the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture.
But science and seed management are only half the tale. Doherty’s real achievement is to give poetic tenor to the history of seed dispersal, and to the beauty, diversity, and abundance of seeds themselves. I learned back in college about the constant movement of plants and animals across almost inexplicable distances, and how this spread increased exponentially with the European “discovery” of the Americas. Doherty’s Columbian Exchange photographs help me reimagine this important migration by framing it in terms of bouquets of flowers much like those I pick all summer from my front yard perennial garden. Her arrangements are flatter, showing single leaves and seed pods splayed against a bright light box whiteness. But they have a similar beauty that coaxes me into slowing down to consider their varied shapes and wave-like patterns. They prompt a desire to come up with each plant’s name and to contemplate the history of their spread across parts of America. The artist’s vision of pycnantha reflects this same notion in a different fashion. Here she arranges this Australian acacia’s tiny blossoms across a white sheet to suggest seeds being dispersed by the wind.
Seed bank scientists know that freezing seeds is the best way to preserve them for the tens and even hundreds of years until they are needed. An essential part of this preservation practice involves periodically germinating samples of the seeds to make sure they remain viable. Doherty draws attention to this testing but also to other biogenetic research that goes on in these laboratories by showing us an array of banana clone seedlings that quickly disabuses us of
the belief that “clone” means identical. She arranges epiphyte seeds to suggest the growth of a bacterium, and the flowers of banksia so that they seem to sprout across the sheet like expanding yeast bubbles. A lenticular photograph of sunflower seedlings reflects the translation from freezing to growing in its shift from blue to green. A similarly made photograph shifts from green and brown to reflect the drying of ash tree seeds for storage. Where the sunflowers come to life, shifting and dancing across the frame, the ash seeds transition to stasis, their ordered slashes bringing to mind an Agnes Martin painting. Metaphor is never far from the artist’s mind. A photograph titled Finite even draws attention to the confluence between seed plentitude and star clusters.
It is easy to get carried away by all the light-infused beauty. Doherty’s images reflect a kind of biophilia that comfortably aligns them with long-standing traditions of landscape and nature photography. This take is not surprising. Despite today’s postmodern framework of irony and emotional remove, many of us still comfortably connect nature to beauty. It is hard, after all, not to be amazed by the balloon-like structures of Yucca seed pods, their internal shelf-like layers, and how their spherical shape splits open at the top to facilitate release.
Even as Archiving Eden celebrates beauty, variety, and growth, it refuses to release us from the subject at hand. The ash tree seeds that Doherty so carefully lines up across one of her lenticular images have been collected by America’s main national seed bank in Fort Collins, Colorado, in response to an impending species crash brought by the accidental introduction in the 1990s of the emerald ash borer from northeast Asia. The artist uses art to ask us not only to appreciate the wonderful variety of seeds, but also to think hard about what we are doing to our surroundings, and to appreciate the monumental efforts of some to retain our global biodiversity. She reminds us that seeds, in all their diversity and staying power, are our backstop to disaster.
Tree Swallow, Tachycineta bicolor
Collected from Tatoosh Island,
Clallam County, Washington, 1995
Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates; Photographed 2012
Archival pigment print
32 x 32 inches
San Francisco-based photographer Sharon Beals draws attention to the architecture of bird nests and offers a window into the lives of birds. The natural nesting site of the tree swallow is an arboreal cavity, often one created by woodpeckers in mature or declining trees. Bird nests can be constructed of unusual and idiosyncratic combinations of materials, as can be seen in this example of a tree swallow’s nest with goose feathers lining a loose cup of grass and twigs. While few nests are collected today, these nests and eggs are used for research, providing important information about their builder’s habitats, DNA, diseases, and other survival issues.
Lion’s Mane Jelly (Cyanea capillata), 2014/2016
Archival pigment print
20 x 24 inches
The lion’s mane is the world’s largest jellyfish species, its bell reaching a diameter of 3 feet or more. This photograph is from Spineless, Susan Middleton’s series exploring the mysterious and surprising world of marine invertebrates, which represent more than 98% of the known animal species in the ocean. Middleton is a San Francisco-based photographer who specializes in the portraiture of rare and endangered animals, plants, sites, and cultures.
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Anger into Wisdom, 2019
Serigraph
22.25 x 27.5 inches
Born in Morelia, Mexico, Alfredo Arreguín came to the United States in 1959 and currently resides in Seattle. His intricate and brilliantly colored canvases and prints are informed by his memories of Mexican culture and the natural landscape as well as the environment and the animals of the Pacific Northwest. The hypnotic and meditative patterns in his works are based on pre-Aztec images, Mexican tiles, and geometric and optical patterns.
Eclipse, 2018
Serigraph
22 x 27 inches
Akule Explosion, 2014–15
Archival pigment print
20 x 24 inches
Imagine seeing what you think is a coral reef, only to realize that there is movement within the shape and that it is actually a massive school of fish. That is what happened to Wayne Levin as he swam in Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay on his way to photograph dolphins. The fish he encountered were akule, the Hawaiian name for bigeye scad.
In the years that followed, he developed a fascination with the beauty and synchronicity of these schools of akule, and he spent a decade photographing them. Based in Hawaii, Levin has photographed numerous aspects of the underwater world: sea life, surfers, canoe paddlers, divers, swimmers, shipwrecks, seascapes, and aquariums.
Running Bird, Turtle Eggs, and Iguana, 2016
Inkjet prints on aluminum
18 x 24 inches each
New York-based artist Steve Miller partnered with scientists in the Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Belém to access radiology equipment necessary to create these X-rays of local flora and fauna. They are from his Health of the Planet series, in which he merges medical diagnostics, ecology, and art in a metaphorical checkup of the Amazon, the “lungs of the planet.”
Lucid Stead: Chromatic Variants, 2013–19
Archival pigment prints
18 x 18 inches each
This series of prints is inspired by Lucid Stead, the artist’s 2013 installation in Joshua Tree, California. Smith transformed an existing homesteader shack into a mirrored structure that, by day, reflected the desert surroundings and, by night, shifted into a color-changing projected-light installation (pictured on page 53).
The Chromatic Variant series features tight arrays of transparent colored lines that separate and merge the reflection of the desert. From a distance, the prints appear as color-tinted stills of the Lucid Stead environment caught in a specific moment during the shack’s changing color spectrum. A closer look reveals that the colored bands are overlaid on the view of the desert, recalling the
artist’s use of the surrounding landscape as a medium reflected across the banded, mirrored surface of Lucid Stead. Smith’s choice of six colors echoes the spectrum of colored light used in the four windows and doorway of Lucid Stead, while his use of black and white pays homage to the changing of the desert light from the brightness of day to the black of night.