Working as PlantBot Genetics, Jeff Schmuki and Wendy DesChene invent new ways to connect nature with our everyday lives. Their collaborative projects foster community discussion, understanding, and ideas for changing current environmental stresses, food shortages, and wasteful practices. This residency at the Center will focus on a series of illuminated garden interventions. The public will be invited to assist in planting gardens suitable to Charlotte and beneficial for bees and other pollinators. At night, the gardens will be illuminated with off-the-grid solar systems powering portable lights to attract moths as well as other nighttime insects.
Evening public talks in the gardens will underscore the decline of the honeybee population and the need to not only preserve environments suitable for bees, but to also seek alternatives for pollination. Field reports, drawings, and images will be compiled to document, promote, and advance awareness for this Environmental Artist-in-Residence Program project. PlantBot Genetics will also present the bright yellow ArtLab, an 18-foot enclosed cargo trailer outfitted with Moth Project educational material will visit McColl Center for Art + Innovation and venues across Charlotte to further expand the community’s understanding of the importance of pollination and need for change. Visit mccollcenter.org for dates and times starting in June.
Canadian Wendy DesChene and American Jeff Schmuki began practicing together as an artist team in 2009. Both have extensive careers as solo artists in addition to their collaborative experience which has included a residency award at the American Academy in Rome and Monsantra, a traveling exhibition presented in six countries including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the Goethe Institute in Cairo, Egypt. Currently, Wendy DesChene is an Associate professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama and Jeff Schmuki is Assistant Professor of Art at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia.