Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies

Jennifer Willet
Sep 29 - Oct 13, 2024
ArtSpeak Gallery (Arts Council Windsor & Region)

https://onculturedays.ca/2024-creatives-in-residence/jennifer-willet/

The "Gentleman Scientist—Microecologies" pop-up exhibition featured Dr. Jennifer Willet as part of the ONCD's Creative in Residence program. It was hosted at ArtSpeak Gallery from September 29 to October 13. This event coincided with the Baroque Biology Community Event and Science Fair at Point Pelee National Park. On October 6, a tour bus was provided to facilitate visits to the Point Pelee Baroque Biology Event.

In 2017, Jennifer Willet developed a performative alter ego called the Gentleman Scientist, an entertaining and gender fluid critique of the Western tradition of scientific rationality. The Gentleman Scientist is a ringmaster, a specialist, a time traveler, a buffoon, whose once white coat is filthy. He has 8 snow globes attached to the front and back like mutant breasts or egg sacks. Within each snow globe live colonies of microorganisms, bacteria, yeast, algae. They are fascinating, beautiful and putrid.

Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies is a 360° diorama installation installed on a sewing mannequin, which serves as a portrait of a character and a garment as it moves through ecologies and time, all the while accruing microbes and meaning–literal and metaphorical passengers.

Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies, like most of Willet’s practice, challenges hierarchies of truth, knowledge and experience within traditional manifestation of scientific rationality. With innovations in science and technology, the future will be measured in multitudes, rather than fact or fiction. Willet’s work proposes iterative feminist, post-colonial, and post-speciesist visions of our shared biotech future that values scientific knowledge and biotech innovation in chorus with social, cultural, aesthetic and non-human knowledges. Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies is a cacophony ecology of human and non-human organisms living, reproducing and dying in a shared laboratory environment.