Each year, one Wofford student is granted the opportunity to partake in the Whetsell Fellowship. This year-long project culminates with the student’s creation of their individual art exhibition in the Richardson Family Art Gallery each spring semester. This year’s Whetsell Fellow is studio art and environmental science double-major Kimber Keene ‘25.
Keene has been working on pieces for her exhibition, titled “A Fed Gator is a Dead Gator,” since the summer before this academic year. She began assembling her display in January and early February.
She traces her initial inspiration for “A Fed Gator is a Dead Gator” to some local nature trails near her home on Daniel Island, South Carolina. While still in the early phases of this project, she made continuous note of the frequent warnings towards alligators targeted at those in her community, which she noted through the appearance of signs and Facebook posts.
Keene said that her advisor, Dr. Jessica Scott-Felder, noticed her continuous discussion of alligators and their presence along these trails and encouraged her to pursue this idea.
“Daniel Island has a couple of different Facebook pages where you can find a bunch of alligator slander, but you can also find people advocating for them,” Keene said, “ So there’s a giant community of misunderstandings for alligators specifically.”
She harnessed this focus throughout her five pieces, several of which exhibit quite a physical undertaking on Keene’s part, including the two life-sized alligator models positioned on the floor in the center.
“I was in an experimentation phase when I started making them,” Keene said, “It was all about doing it for the fun of it, not necessarily doing it to be in the show.”
These pieces and Keene’s print included in “A Fed Gator is a Dead Gator” deal with texture to discuss the camouflaging nature of alligators and how it contributes to the public’s fear of them.
In terms of this issue’s impacts on the Daniel Island community, Keene mentioned that these alligators cannot be relocated, per local law, a fact which seemed to strengthen her passion and sympathy embedded into this exhibition.
She remarked that the negative instances and perceptions surrounding alligators on Daniel Island helped her to realize how humans are putting so much of their own opinion and bias on what these gators are doing without a deeper understanding of their longstanding ecological history in the region.
While this exhibit hones in on the misconceptions around alligators in Keene’s hometown specifically, the implications of her exhibition seem to share an even broader message.
“It’s about seeing and not understanding something in nature, yet assuming you have authority over it, without knowing it, without understanding it,” Keene said. “Thinking something is a nuisance when it’s not impacting us in a negative way, we’re just scared and we don’t want to see them.”
At her artist’s talk on Feb. 27, Keene emphasized her personal ties to her subject and its relevance to her hometown and explained some of the artistic choices present in her exhibit, again underlining the importance of the alligator’s appearance in relation to its perception.
Keene also seemed to incorporate an element of her inspiration for this project into a displayed component of her exhibit. In the center of her two juxtaposed alligator sculptures, a screen plays a video compilation of some of the local Facebook posts that influenced the artist’s themes, as well as some photos and videos she collected herself.
Keene’s “A Fed Gator is a Dead Gator” calls upon a uniquely human trait of our often misplaced fear of the unknown. Through an impressive and diverse array of mediums, this exhibit conveys the nature of these fears and the unintentional danger they can pose in response.
Keene’s exhibit was on display from the beginning of the spring semester until Feb. 27. The Richardson Family Art Gallery space has since been cleared to usher in pieces for the annual Hot Now display.
