In Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997), the titular princess, a girl named San raised by a wolf-goddess, wears the furs of her lupine clan, her scent camouflaged away—and, with it, part of her humanness. She is both maiden and wolf. In Lee Pivnik’s Chimeras—an exhibition inspired by the artist’s speculative, sci-fi story, set in 2086—animal guises shield the eponymous chimeras, safeguarding them from prying eyes and functioning as markers of solidarity.
Who are the chimeras? In this future-world, Pivnik (a Miyazaki fan) imagines a Florida impacted by the most extreme version of current sea level-rise models. “A Category 5 in early June,” Pivnik’s tale begins, presented on a wall didactic. “…[T]he earth plunged into darkness as the sea engulfed the land.” With the mainland overtaken by authoritarian forces, the rest of Miami has fragmented into small islands, overgrown with mangroves and surrounded by floating detritus. It’s here on these islands, after the floods and the fallout, where the chimeras—a group of queer autonomists—assume the guise of aquatic creatures and refuse to abandon the place they love. They are humans, to be sure, but forever entwined with the land, interspecies communication integral to their existence.
The show brings Pivnik’s story to life with photographs and those real-life disguises, presented as astonishing sculptural objects. Swamp Lily (all works, 2024) takes the form of a stained-glass alligator head—Pivnik’s wondrous hand-crafted stained-glass, that is, comprised of translucent jingle shells and copper foil—and doubles as a lamp. An amalgamation of other animals, it contains a fossilized dolphin jaw, ridged shark teeth, the ribs of a lamb. In accompanying photographs—such as Swamp Lily (in the springs)—queer Miamians drape its silvery maw over their own heads and drift through the water. Pivnik’s magnificent craftsmanship renders what might be unwieldy (in less delicate hands) into a multitudinous treasure: a practical mask, a beast, a warm glow. The alligator holds a hunk of pine-rosin where its tongue would be, shaped into a human heart and outfitted with a bulb. For the lamp to operate, the heart must break, the heat gently melting the rosin and filling the room with the scent of earth.
Leviathan, a nine-foot-tall sawfish built with Pivnik’s signature seashell glass, is not the last of its kind, one hopes. Late last year, throughout the Florida Keys, eighty species of fish, sharks, and rays—among them the critically endangered smalltooth sawfish—began to swirl in circles, spinning and spiraling until they died.1 Nearly a year later, scientists determined that a combination of toxic algae was the likely culprit. There are an estimated 650 breeding female smalltooth sawfish left in Florida waters; in Pivnik’s world, they’re still here—both the fish themselves and the chimeras embodying them—but rare enough to earn a mythical moniker. Leviathan’s size seems too cumbersome for a costume, but encased in soft silk, the sculpture embraces its wearer, as seen in Leviathan (in the creek), a photograph in which a chimera becomes the sawfish.
The chimeras, of course, are mimics, echoing their animal counterparts. Pivnik knows the magic of biological mimicry: he’s the co-director of the Institute of Queer Ecology, a collective of artists, scientists, and activists that describe themselves as an “ever-evolving collaborative organism.” “The Institute itself is a mimic,” Pivnik shares, “mimicking institutionality to slip into spaces that don’t typically humor experimental, alternative thinking.” Inspired by the ability of organisms to find themselves in each other, I’d give everything to bloom is a glazed stoneware sculpture: a terraneous, lizard-shaped creature with a beautiful pink-floral head. She’s a new epiphyte, a being-within-a being, and comes paired with Tendril Claw—an in-bloom gauntlet for you, the viewer, to wear on your arm and imitate your lizard friend who, in turn, imitates an orchid. (Orchids themselves engage in mimicry, enticing pollinators to visit without offering food in return.)
On a long stretch of wall space is a series of fourteen photographs—Leviathan, monitor array—UV-printed on thin squares of shells, to diaphanous effect. While the other exhibited photographs recall Pivnik’s history as a child nature photographer, these simulate surveillance monitors: that aforesaid militarism of the new Miami. But they prove that the chimeras’ obfuscation works. Look closely: A tattoo here, a rostrum there, Swamp Lily’s red-shell eye, a swath of skin. Photographed underwater, the chimeras avert even your gaze, recognizable only to the swamp. Viewing Leviathan (monitor array), in fact, incites an eerie sensation: one imagines that the chimeras are watching, witnessing your failure to apprehend them. The chimeras are new inhabitants of the mangrove swamp, but they are also vestiges of a time before colonization, when the land’s liveness was felt by all who tended it. The destruction has prompted the return of abundant subtropical forest spirits, omniscient and observant. Even now, on quiet days at the water’s edge, you can feel them.
[1] Bethany Augliere, “We finally know what caused Florida fish to spin in circles until they died,” National Geographic, September 6, 2024, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/why-fish-are-spinning-to-death-florida.
Lee Pivnik’s Chimeras is on view at Dale Zine, Miami through November 24, 2024.
