Artist Date, Week Five ~ Desert Botanical Garden

I have been to the Desert Botanical Gardens numerous times over the years, and have brought my out-of-town visitors to view this beautiful place.  I have attended many concerts there and also enjoy going to the Las Noches de Las Luminarias during the holiday season, and Agave on the Rocks event during the spring.  I have also attended lectures and special events for Earth Day there.  But the one thing I have never seen there is their Butterfly Pavilion.  Twice a year they have for several weeks a Butterfly Pavillion that you can walk through. 

I was watching last week my favorite sitcom, Modern Family, where Manny is afraid of butterflies. Right then and there I decided I need to go see the Mariposa Monarca Monarch Butterfly Exhibit at the Desert Botanical Garden. You walk into this pavilion and are surrounded by the most breathtakingly beautiful butterflies.  I could have sat there for hours taking in the sights of these gorgeous creatures.

I was telling one of the staff about the Modern Family episode, and she told me that the older kids are actually more afraid of the butterflies than the younger ones.  She said in the spring time they have about ten different species of butterflies in the pavilion and these butterflies will actually come and try to land on your nose and head.  She said it freaks out some of the older kids.  The monarch butterflies will fly around you, but they never try to land on your body.

I have never taken advantage of this fabulous butterly exhibition at the Desert Botanical Garden, but now I am hooked.  I will make sure I go and see the spring butterfly exhibit as well.  Hopefull, I will have some beautiful creature land on my nose.  I guarantee you that I will not freak out.

While I was there I stopped by the Ottosen Gallery in Dorrance Hall where Artist Gwynn Popovac’s Biomythic Masks are on display.  They are visages of human features blended with the shapes, textures and hues of natural habitats  - desert, tide pool, ice fields, meadow lands.  In a sense they are humans mimicking nature, and they offer visions of us as biomythic beings - spiritual animals aware of our essential inextricable bond with the natural world.  Gwynn says, "They are conceived to be wearable; I feel this is essential to the definition of a mask...the possibility of putting it on.  Seeing through the eye holes of a mask can elicit a shift in consciousness.  I believe masks have been, and continue to be, a means to expand human compassion - for all life forms - all flora and fauna, each other, our planet."

       When the soul wishes to experience something

she throws an image of the experience out

before her and enters into her own image.

MEISTER ECKHART