By Force of Habit, February 1998

By Force of Habit brought Lars Chellberg’s ephemeral outdoor work with living animals into the gallery for the first time. Untitled I, II and III, house the Nephlia Madagascarus [giant spiders] and their simple yet intricate spun homes. The black boxes containing working spiders and their ephemeral webs become drawings in a living process. Cricket Chorus Number Two explores the boundary between human shelter and the pre-human exterior. The song, by scores of crickets, functions as an ambient sound sculpture for the show, sonically flipping inside with outside when the primordial din, thin in the morning hours, builds to a crescendo by evening. Variations on a One Cell Organism, Investigations of Cellular Mutation and Evolution presents a field of photographs still bearing the memory of their previous form, that of the simple childhood paper airplane. The simple process of folding chemicals within photo sensitive sheets assembles into a multiple of striking images bearing similarity to a thousand Rorschach blots.

In Collection, a green air force of folded one dollar bills, pinned to the wall with golden needles, blurs between distances of five to infinity feet resembling a collection of green moths or suddenly falling leaves, a shuttering suggestion of the tenuousness of possession.