A MacKenzie survey takes strange flights in What The Bat Knows
Art | Gregory Beatty | Juy 28, 2022

What The Bat Knows
MacKenzie Art Gallery
Until May 2023
Some people find bats fascinating. Most, though, probably not. In fact, fear of bats is an actual phobia (chiroptophobia). Was it perhaps a bit risky for curator Crystal Mowry to title her debut MacKenzie Gallery exhibition What The Bat Knows?. Maybe, but on the other hand, the title is intriguing.
Mowry was appointed Director of Programs at the MacKenze last August. Before that, she was the senior curator at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. In a recent interview, Mowry said the idea for the show came when she was reviewing the MacKenzie’s permanent collection.
“As a curator, I often find myself looking at the permanent collection to understand an institution’s history,” she says. “I wanted to think about what it might mean to displace that experience and have it live in some other form that we don’t fully know.”
When Mowry was exploring the collection, she found three wall-mounted porcelain sculptures of bat faces by Shary Boyle.
“I’ve worked with Shary before and was so charmed by these objects and their ability to look not only like bats, but also like something from our imagination,” says Mowry. “I thought maybe they could be my collaborators. There are three of them, so I started to imagine what it would be like if each one had their own identity or perspective on the collection.”
Mowry’s idea even had a kernel of real-life inspiration through a story she heard years ago from a friend who worked in the Royal Ontario Museum art department.
“She told me of a custodial staff member who found a bat in the museum at night,” she says. “And I remember thinking ‘It seems so unusual that this creature found its way into the institution.’
“I’d probably associated bats with rural areas, but bats live in cities too,” she adds. “They can thrive in those environments, where they have a nocturnal life that is largely unknown to those of us who move through the world in the daytime.”
Bat Chat
Contrary to the popular saying, bats aren’t actually blind. In fact, some species can see quite well both in daylight and at night. Still, they do rely heavily on a biological form of sonar called echolocation to detect insect prey and otherwise navigate safely at night.
To try to get a bat’s eye (ear?) view of life on the Saskatchewan prairie, Mowry did some academic reading, including books by researcher Merlin Tuttle.
“I also thought about narratives where bats surface in folklore and pop culture,” she says. “They’ve been vilified, both in Hollywood films and, of course, with the coronavirus pandemic. But there’s some interesting stories too where bats are personified as debt collectors or creatures involved in shady business. Maybe they’re so flexible that way because we don’t really understand them, and they seem so strange to us.”
What the Bat Knows opened in May. It runs until next May and is divided into three parts, with a partial switchout of works this fall and winter as each bat offers their perspective on the work on display. That’s done through a series of text panels written by Mowry in the “voice” of each bat.
“I like to think of the first bat as being more of a socialist and interested in collective good and community,” she says. “The second bat is more of a capitalist, so the tone of the labels will change. Then the final bat is a dreamer, so they’re maybe not so interested in this place, or this world, at all. They’re imagining an elsewhere that is completely imaginary.”
Remember, though, this is human art as “seen” through the eyes/ears of a bat. Take this trio of works in the current show: a lithograph by Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak of a snowy owl, Boyle’s three bats, and three cibachrome prints by Aganetha and Richard Dyck from their Hive Scan series that feature bees.
“As a curator, I could easily lump them into one group and say, ‘They all fly,’” says Mowry. “Perhaps that’s enough of a connective tissue to bind them together. But the bat has very different relationships with those species than us.”
To begin with, there are major taxonomic differences between the animals: owls are birds, bees insects, and bats mammals.
Not that bats give a crap about that. They have more immediate concerns — owls prey on bats. Both animals hunt at night, and recent research has shown that when some bat species are caught by owls they mimic the buzzing of stinging insects like bees to scare the owl into releasing them.
Like bats with echolocation, bees also have a unique way of navigating. That comes through their ability to see UV light, and over many millions of years, flowers have evolved elaborate UV displays to attract bees as pollinators.
Other works reference whales, which are able to communicate over long distances by song; fungi, which exist in vast integrated networks; and wolves, which similar to bats, have a bad rep with humans. Lupophobia is the clinical term for fear of wolves, and in the horror realm bats and wolves have been demonized in vampire and werewolf legends.
Bat #2, as Mowry noted, will have more of a capitalist perspective. “That perhaps puts it closer to humans — or at least those who prioritize a more extractivist way of moving through the world,” she says.
“There will be images of industrial operations and mining that have local relevance through documentary photographs by George Hunter, so we’ll see another kind of movement underground or in the dark. But this time it’s humans gleaning wealth from the earth. There will also be references to military operations and objects housed in institutions that are made of bronze and copper, so again that relates to mining, and the idea of material wealth.”
When Mowry and I spoke, she hadn’t written the text panels for the third bat yet. But she did have the works picked out. One is by African-American artist Joseph Yoakum (1891–1972).
“I guess you could consider him a naïve artist. He didn’t start drawing until quite late in life,” says Mowry.
“He started this exhaustive process of drawing places he’d visited as a member of the U.S. military, where he’d been stationed all over the world. But they all kind of look the same, so he had a limited vocabulary with the landscapes he drew. You get a sense that perhaps he hadn’t been to these places, and that he was imagining them. There’s been a lot of speculation on that. And he worked in the circus at some point too, so he was a great storyteller.”
Other works will reference dreams and dreamworlds that are core to some Indigenous spiritual traditions.
When you enter What the Bat Knows, the first work you see (after Boyle’s bats) is a Margaret May lithograph called Night Journey — Full Moon. And overall, the gallery, in keeping with the bat’s nocturnal lifestyle, is dimly lit.
“When I think about vital sites for storytelling, I think of the ritual bedtime story, and the intimacy that comes from reading together at night,” says Mowry. “Or maybe sitting around a campfire, where the stars are your illumination. And then being in a theatrical space, where people gather in the dark to experience a play or movie.
“I want the space to feel like that,” she says.