The Color of Memory: Bats

The fifth and final section of the Color of Memory is an exploration of the summer home to the largest colony of bats in the world. Between the months of March and October, an estimated 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats roost in the Bracken Cave in Comal County, Texas, outside the city of San Antonio. The Mexican free-tailed bat is the only animal directly referenced in The Color of Memory. The bat is a connector and surrogate for many lifeforms that inhabit our landscapes. An indispensable part of the ecosystem, bats, perform jobs like pollination, seed dispersal, and insect control, linking the to the species directly to the land they inhabit. Each night in the summer months, all of the 20 million bats exit the cave through a single aperture. The colony begins to fly out around sunset, in a clockwise vortex ascending into the sky to disperse. This truly sublime event continues in waves for approximately two and a half to three hours. The Color of Memory: Bats explores this transcendent phenomenon by overlaying time and the perception of the chaos of the exiting of the Mexican free-tailed bats from the Bracken Cave. The photographic imagery created in Bats hopes to present the linked questions of perspective and perception through combining multiple moments in time from shifting camera positions.