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XIX XIII
Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, 2024
Often utilizing insects considered to be pests as part of the work, Ransom’s sculptures and installations engage these often-unwanted species as collaborators and inspiration, ultimately using their building structures and societal patterns as metaphor to explore our own human systems. Ransom proposes humanity’s analogous existence as the largest and most complex pest-network on the planet.
In a spectacular eruption, billions of noisy insects emerged from underground in April 2021, and their arrival consumed headlines. Periodical cicadas, who spend the majority of their lifecycle underground, are once again emerging across much of the Southeast and Midwest this summer. The title of this work, XIX XIII, refers to the 17- and 13-year cicada broods that are beginning their synchronized emergence in 2024 for the first time in 221 years. Humans have utilized the cicada as a marker of time, seasonal change, and transformation. From Homer’s Iliad to early motifs found in art from the Chinese Shang Dynasty, the cicada has always been a symbol of renewal, rebirth, transformation, and immortality.
Ransom’s 3D-printed cicada forms, found on a scaffolded abstract and skeletal tree trunk, suggest the adaptation humans face amidst a moment in history of an eruption of environmental and societal change. The miniature figure of the artist emerging from the back of a cicada, rendered in a glow-in-the-dark filament, evokes the way in which cicadas emerge in a backflip motion from their shell. As cicadas shed their old exoskeletons for new beginnings, humans too must navigate and transform within a world continually reshaped.
Images by Melissa Tran