The Cube - striking, ambitious and sometimes downright bizarre - belongs to d'Arenberg, a winery over a 100 years old which produces a brilliant sparkling red, among other things. Someone with a sense of humour named the wines. Suda and I loved The Innocent Weed, The Laughing Magpies and The Dead Arm, but The Cenosilicaphobic Cat (named for the fear of an empty glass) wins the prize. Go for the wines, stay for the art gallery.
The earth here tells a story that goes back 280 million years to when a glacial lake covered this land. Even after all these aeons, you can read it in the jagged cliffs of the amphitheatre, in the layers and ripples of the Sugarloaf, and in the smooth surfaces and deep grooves cut by ice marching inexorably across stone. I particularly love finding the 'erratic' rocks, picked up by glaciers and carried for miles in an adventure in slow motion, never knowing where they were going to land up.
Such a great exhibit at MOD. The story starts in Borneo. It's the early 1950s and the WHO are working to eliminate malaria in these parts. They spray DDT, BHC and Dieldrin in an effort to control mosquito populations. And it works! During a 21 month period, the percentage of mosquitoes carrying malaria-causing parasites falls from 35.6 percent to 1.6 percent. But (among other effects on the environment) DDT also kills domestic cats, who lick it off their fur and consume it through the small animals who are their prey - and who also have DDT in their systems. This is a kind of bioamplification, where the concentration of DDT in organisms builds up progressively with every step up the food chain and it is particularly devastating to those top predators like cats. And the story doesn't stop there. The drop in cats around town fuels an explosion in the rat population, which leads to outbreaks of slyvatic plague and typhus. The lesson, my friends, is don't fuck around with DDT, but also possibly, everything is connected.
