Love Motel for Insects is an ongoing series of outdoor installations intended to construct situations between humans and non-human life-forms with open-ended opportunities for activism. The works use ultra-violet lights on enormous blank canvases to attract insects and creates an opportunity for public interactions with nocturnal arthropods, which are not often seen. These works have become the backdrop for community picnics, graffiti jams, political rallies, scientific investigations, musical events, and even local film screenings relating to local species. At each site, the bugs reproduce and create pheromone paintings and collaborating members of the public are invited to participate in activities they create and those I attempt to catalyze. Attempting to attract insects, I set-up primitive structures made from black (ultra-violet) lights and bed-sheets placed in the forest floor. Within moments hundreds of flying visitors came to the piece- fluttering moths, blood-sucking Hemipteras, clunky beetles, delicate caddisflies, ants, lacewings, and many more- the diversity of colors, shapes, and sizes was fantastic! Female moths released chemical pheromones to attract mates and consequently "painted" the piece, beetles hungrily lumped one upon the other while releasing vibrant colored eggs and primordial fluids- a kind of arthropod rite of Bacchus and abstract expressionism.
