During a summer residency at the Tiputini Biodiversity Research Station, I offered a Dutch Boy paint sample and nontoxic ink to a colony of leaf cutter ants. (this image). For me, the ants’ gestural traces are curiously resonant with modernist painting, but these culturally specific meanings are lost on the ant authors themselves, as they engage, interpret, and act upon the surface’s materiality with entirely different sensory apparatus, spatio-temporal perspectives, and social frames of reference.
