Artist shows ‘weird, creepy critters’ in a different light

Art crawlers looking for a spine-chilling Final Friday exhibit this Halloween will find a psychedelic menagerie of creepy and odd insects at 232 Vertigo Gallery. The space on North Market Street – formerly known as the Shopkeepers Gallery – will host “Creeping Lovelies,” a new show by Alex Walker that focuses on insect anatomy, bright colors and weird interpretations of bugs that often induce screams and shivers.

“I’ve always been really interested in those kinds of organisms,” Walker said. “A lot of people feel like they’re gross. When people are grossed out or disgusted by something, they’ll shut it out and not really learn anything about it. The idea of this show is to use certain colors and other aesthetics to make them look beautiful and encourage people to give these insects a different look and see them at another angle.”

Walker has created 15 distinct prints for the show, most measuring 18-by-24, with some larger works that span multiple panels. They were all made digitally, and part of the exhibit will feature projected videos of him making the pieces. He wanted the focus to be on what he calls “weird, creepy critters” because he sees myriad complexities within insect bodies. He also finds bright colors enthralling and noted that while their use is exaggerated in his art, the insect kingdom itself is quite multihued.

“A lot of people are aware that different species have bright coloration, but even among ones that are brown or black or earth tone, there are a lot of variations within those colors,” he said. “If you take black ants and hold them up to the light through their exoskeleton, you’ll see a lot of variation there. They end up looking like they’re made out of marble or something like that. There’s a lot of variety.”

The prints themselves offer insects that have as much personality as they do rich color. One features a purple ant standing tall and wearing a vintage button-down shirt. Another showcases an almost see-through neon fly, with each body part finely detailed. A giant spider with claw-like legs spreads out across a red-orange backdrop in a piece that may spook arachnophobic viewers. In another, a pair of golden praying mantises interlock their long, slender legs, highlighting the bug’s majestic physique.

Other pieces incorporate human imagery mixing with the insects. One shows a balding man with a neon grasshopper running across his forehead playfully. Another takes a more devilish angle, with two fly-like creatures sporting dark-red heads and exposed orbs for brains staring each other down.

“It’s a deviation away from the idea of making bugs pretty and getting more into making them weird,” Walker said. “When I make them, I end up with a couple dozen different layers. Some will have lines, while others will have different swaths of color with different blending modes. The layers make up the final piece that I import, and then animate. It shows the dimensionality of the process. It’s digitally a lot different than when I work on acrylics.”

Walker said he hopes that people come away from the show with a broader appreciation for how intricate insects are as organisms.

“In a lot of ways, the coolest part of exoskeleton organisms is the way that they’re built in a very different way from us as humans. It’s not just having their skeletons on the outside; it’s all of the interlocking components. They’re like living action figures…all these little tiny bits that interlock over parts of themselves. They’re such tiny packages and yet are so complex.”

This story was originally published October 30, 2014 at 3:02 PM with the headline "Artist shows ‘weird, creepy critters’ in a different light."