Gail Wight is fascinated by the interplay between art and biology.  In Hexapodarium: Finding Beauty In The Unexpected, her creative power fixed on flies, whose wings take on a variety of shapes in a collection seen here all together for the very first time.  

     “While sweeping up the flies in my studio after a particularly hot summer, I hesitated over the trash bin, amazed at the resiliency of these little ‘pests.’ I photographed their wings beneath a few different microscopes and then projected them another 240 million years into the future.”

An exercise in extreme photography, these images contain between 500-600 layers apiece.  Wight’s ultrachrome prints imagine flowers made of fly wings bursting with life of her own creation:

“I try to imagine ancient shorelines in desert patches and swamps covering barren plateaus. It seems so relevant, speeding along a freeway constructed of pulverized river beds and seashells. I’m looking for prolonged chords, where the deep past resonates in the present.”

Gail Wight is on the Stanford University Art Faculty and was previously at Mills College.

Land of the Flies