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"SHADOWS" | 1992
Otter Sculptures
Bevis 11A.jpg
“Bronzes of animal victims accuse humankind”
Anchorage Daily News | Sunday, February 21, 1993 | by Jan Ingram

...The most poignant bronzes are the otters from the 1989 Prince William Sound oil spill. The saddest of these is a blackened otter in fetal position all alone in a little room. Enough oil has been poured on it to slicken its belly and to give the gallery air a faint oily smell. It’s easy to be seduced by the superb detail of the otter’s fur. If you give in to the temptation to touch it, you will no doubt be shocked as I was by how cold and hard and absolutely “dead” it really is.

 

Composer Phil Munger’s soundscape, “Shadows,” includes Ann Chandonnet solemnly intoning poetry and quotes, such as words from Exxon Valdez Capt. Joe Hazelwood the morning the tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling eleven million gallons of crude into Prince Edward Sound: “We’re fetched up…and we’re going to be here for a while…” This further chills the gallery down.

from  Peter Bevis Oral History

FEBRUARY 1992
 

I knew there were some sea otters being held as evidence for the upcoming Exxon Valdez trial. But how do I find them?

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No-one wanted to talk about it or deal with it. They kept bumping me down the line to two young women who had been marine biologists in Prince William Sound before the spill. They were sea otter specialists but they couldn’t continue their research after the spill and the Exxon lawyers had sequestered, squished, put under lock and key every report they ever wrote about sea otters. When I showed them my portfolio of road kills and said I wanted to broaden into spill kills, they said, “Well, at least, someone will know what happened if he casts these things.”

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Let me back up…In 1989 I was polishing road kills at the Foundry with my headphones on. I heard the news about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I had an epiphany. Oh, oil spills. That oil is for our cars, too. Those lumps in the oil were the whales and the otters who weren’t at the bargaining table when it was decided to build a tanker terminal in Valdez. They had come to the surface and there’s a foot of oil on them. They’re dead.

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After I showed the researchers my portfolio, they said, “Don’t we have the keys around here somewhere?” They had five refrigerated semi-truck vans parked at the Linden Freight Yard in Anchorage. They’re digging around in their desks. These vans were holding the evidence for the trial.

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Phil drove us to the freight yard. We stomped through the snow. The freezer is covered in icicles. So we find pipes or bars and start chipping and banging the ice off and warming the padlock with BIC lighters to get the key in.

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We swung open those doors with the ice cracking and falling off. And here’s this freezer van half full of freezer bags. “A loon? I don’t want a loon. A seagull? I don’t want a seagull. Seals? Sea otters. Oh, here’s one!” I said, “Can I come back with a crew and take molds of the otters? “ They said, “Yes.”

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I flew back a couple of weeks later...It’s about 20 degrees below zero. It took us about 5 days to make the molds. There were 3 otters and seven heads. All these otters were all cut up. The scientists had taken the sex organs and cut their heads off, adding insult to injury. So, the bronzes we made became a memorial to honor what’s gone and lost.

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The stench was unbearable. A live sea otter smells bad and nothing eats them. Their only known predator is humans who trap them for their fur. If they’d been dead a while, and were covered in oil, the sea otters smelled even worse.

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I had made arrangements with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Sculpture Department to do the molds. Their welding shop had a big box in the ceiling with mechanical arms that suck the welding fumes up into a filter. We pulled out all the hoses so each sea otter had its own hose.

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[This fantastic facility was built with oil money. It may be bad ecologically but look what it’s done…While putting the rubber molds on the sea otter heads, I think of all the heart valves that are made from plastic, which comes from oil. If we all had walrus intestine raincoats instead of Gore-Tex, we wouldn’t have any walruses. So for many, oil is all bad. It’s just a matter of acknowledging and being responsible about how we live.]

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The otters were frozen and they were difficult to work with. We put plastic cups of the molding material into a sink of warm water to heat it up. We’d add the catalyst and pour the rubber mold over the sea otter’s head and let it cure. We did that three or four times. In the meantime, those exhaust fans are pulling up all the stench and blowing it into the ceramics department, which they’re still reminding me about to this day.

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As a  consequence of pouring warm media over the frozen carcass, the mouths of the sea otters heads opened up and moved like they were trying to voice a scream. We didn’t know that until we got back to Seattle, slushed them with wax and peeled the rubber mold off. Here were seven otter heads that all looked different – their mouths gaping open as if shouting the agony of their deaths. They had become something different than what we had started with.

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The bronze otter sculptures were in a show in Anchorage in February 1993. It was a multi-media installation. Phil Munger wrote a haunting piece, “Shadows,” and poet Ann Fox Chandonnet took excerpts from the town meetings and conversations between the wheelhouse and the Coast Guard and made an epic poem to play with Phil’s music.

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