Cicada Paintings
I spent the summer in Chicago collecting 100,000 Cicada shells
Using nothing but the cicada’s natural latching mechanism to adhere
them to the canvas, i’ve started turing them into a series of paintings
the first of these paintings, called “populous“, was completed on November 5, 2024.
I placed cicada shells continuously for 23 hours as votes were counted in
the 2024 presidential election.
A much larger piece is in the works...
Populous
Collection Process
Cicadas live on strict time cycles, there is a population that
comes out every 13 years and one that comes out every 17 years. This past summer was the
first time in 221 years that these cycles overlapped, leading a true spectacle of nature.
The greater Chicago area was swarmed with cicadas, each leaving behind an exoskeleton they mature.
Some called it the “cicadapocalypse“ but I saw it as the perfect opportunity to gather some friends and
go collect 100,000 carefully preserved cicada shells
Read this Texas Monthly article
written about our collection process
Tree Map of “Populace”
either 13 or 17 years under a tree, siphoning nutrients from its roots in order to grow
the very exoskeleton that has been placed on the canvas.
I view these trees as collaborators on this work and in order to properly credit them for their
contribution, the lid of each tub we collected was marked with the exact location of the trees that created
the cicadas inside. We used that data to construct the map below, showing the specific trees
that helped me create “Populace”.
Due to factors such as soil fertility and sunlight, each trees we collected from created slightly different
cicadas. These slight color and size variations played a role in composition of the piece. The trained eye
can pick up exactly where each group of cicadas (all coming from the same tree), start and end. The
image on the right is an overlay of “Populace” with these different populations marked.
Prototypes / Inital Testing
Emergence Report
by Lazo Gitchos
Zane, spinning his camera and microphone towards me, asked if I thought cicadas are smart. “No,” I said, a reflex. I thought of the thousands of red-eyed insects I’d swatted at, picked up, brushed off, and crushed by accident over the last week. Cicadas have, to put it generously, an underdeveloped predator-avoidance instinct. A cicada is not a smart creature; that’s not what it's here on earth to be. The cicadas in Lisle, Illinois, are here this summer to crawl out of the ground, shed a chitinous amber skin, dry off pearl wings, and go to the canopy to eat and scream for a mate. They crawl up the trees in rivers of clicking hooked feet. They tear at one another for positions in the bark from which to emerge and leave behind a vivid cast of their bodies, and they fall in great numbers back to the base of the trees to rot. The decomposing failures, and the nitrogen-rich exoskeletons, feed the trees what nutrients they may lose by the sap-eating of the survivors. Zane, who grew up in Austin with Diego, drove up for the emergence to get over his fear of bugs, and to document Diego's collection and preservation of one hundred thousand exoskeletons. For eight days, the three of us drove through the Chicago suburbs with the windows down and listened. When the screaming became almost unbearable, we pulled into a cul-de-sac and left the cars to pull the bug-shaped shells from trees and fences. We stacked to-go soup containers in the back seat. Zane labeled them. 300 per tub, 334 tubs total. “Paint,” Diego said, when asked what art they would make. “I’m going to use them like paint.” That’s why we needed them from the trees, where their hook-feet were intact and could cling to fabric.
When I was younger we had carpenter ants in the back forty, and I could watch them for hours. They moved as individuals, with goals and motivations in line with the collective but separate from it. Bees were too hard to observe, and wasps and hornets too dangerous, but in ant hills I saw a great cooperation. Zane told me about the leaf cutter ants in Costa Rica, whose colonies operate as superorganisms and use fungus to turn plant matter into their food source. Is that agriculture? Fermentation? And the army ants that operate like a water-beast and kill animals much larger than their individuals? The cicadas have none of that. They are perfectly competitive dunces, and they will tear down every member of their brood for a chance to fly, bumbling, into the treetop to scream. It is a staggering inefficiency, or at least it smells like one. The birds and dogs get fat when the cicadas emerge, and when all the predators are full and happy there are still one trillion cicadas to lay their eggs. Seventeen years later, it will all happen again. So cicadas are not smart like the robins that eat them, or like ants, but in their chaos-blob, their predator-apathy, their relationship to the trees that support many generations in a row, they are non-offensive. An emergence, especially one in which the 13- and 17-year broods are overlapping in the midwest for the first time since 1803, is an impressive thing. But the bugs themselves, armed with a few million years worth of evolutionary intelligence, are just trying to get born and eat and mate before they die.
Video Documentation by Richard Carpenter
Photo Documentation by Zane Giordano