The volcano rabbit is one of the smallest rabbits in the world. It has rounded ears, eats leaves and bark and what domesticated crops it can get its teeth into, and makes a high-pitched sound rather than thump its feet to signal danger. It is most active at dusk and dawn. The rabbit lives only on the pine-studded slopes of four volcanos near Mexico City, and there only tenuously: it’s being pushed up the mountain slopes by habitat encroachment, overhunting, and climate change. Mountains being what they are, the rabbit is running out of room. It’s fast becoming another symbol of the manifold ways in which human activity threatens the planet—of the new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, that scientists have begun calling this period of mass extinction and global warming.
I first saw Kendler’s work in a 2012 solo show at Chicago Artists Coalition called “The Hall of Disappearing,” where she displayed a series of old-fashioned porcelain birds that she had modified—blanketed entirely in lichen, or obscured with a kind of shield, or painted black. If the birds were somehow compromised, or in need of protection, there were a couple larger installations that invited a feeling of greater comfort, notably a tent lined on the inside with fur. Viewers could enter and then, if they wished, take their clothes off. “People really want to have a connection to the natural world,” Kendler says now. “We fill our homes with throw blankets with lions on them, and calendars with hawks, and little tchotchkes with birds on them. And that becomes this sort of surrogate object for this natural connection. I wanted to take these things and rewild them—make them weird and strange again.”
Kendler’s father is a psychiatric geneticist with an interest in philosophy and evolution, which he passed on to his daughter, who reads across disciplines related to her work. She’s been particularly influenced by The Spell of the Sensuous, a book in which the philosopher David Abram tracks the ways that human cultures severed their connections with the natural world: for instance, the invention of phonetic writing, which had the effect of abstracting alphabet symbols that had once represented physical objects of the natural world. “The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology,” Abram wrote. “Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth.” Kendler relates Abram’s book to The Reenchantment of Art by Suzi Gablik, saying that both have a “semi-magical-realist tint” that she’s drawn to—a call for humans to reestablish a greater spiritual connection to the natural world. “I’m not a mysticist in any way, shape, or form,” she says, “but this idea of depth and richness and almost magic being accessible in the natural world—this kind of unfathomable, pleasurable darkness—it’s incredibly interesting, and drives me aesthetically.”
Kendler has continued to make work related to extinct or endangered species: with an artist friend, Molly Schafer, she started the Endangered Species Print Project, which sells prints whose editions are limited to the remaining number of whatever species is depicted in the print—so the whooping crane, for instance, was printed in an edition of 398. Kendler and Schafer donate the money from sales (so far more than $12,000) to an organization that helps protect the species in question; funds raised from sales of whooping crane prints go to Operation Migration. (ESPP prints are on display through October in the show “Rare Nature” at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.)
“What I’m trying to do,” Kendler says, “is make this tiny catalyst to get people to form an emotional connection with the natural world.”
