Butterfly Portals

Butterfly Portals was commissioned by Kirkpatrick Foundation for The Animal Conference 2021 and presented in partnership with OSU Discovery in Oklahoma City. Over three nights, August 25–27, projected video moved across two north-facing canvases—each 34 feet wide and 100 feet tall—transforming the building into a public field of shifting forms, animal imagery, and light.

The work grew from close observation and field recording. Mount spent time among flowers and butterflies, filming monarchs near the site, and transformed his footage of butterflies, flowers, and bison into layered video art. Fascinated by the monarch’s compound eyes, he imagined how a butterfly might perceive the world: color, motion, and scale continually breaking apart and recombining into new forms.

The monarch became a portal between three migratory lives: butterflies traveling between Canada and Mexico, bison that once moved across the southern plains, and Southern Resident killer whales moving through the Pacific Northwest. Oklahoma lies within the monarch’s central migration flyway. The highway and historic rail corridors surrounding the site sharpened the work’s contrast between animal routes and human infrastructure—a history that also includes the role of rail expansion and commercial hunting in the destruction of the great bison herds.

Killer-whale footage and sound were supplied through Ken Balcomb and the Center for Whale Research, including material connected to J35/Tahlequah and her pod.

Chad Mount developed the project as commissioned artist, leading the concept, visual design, animation and content creation, projection-mapping design, adaptation to the site, installation direction, and on-site alignment and testing.

Following the original presentation, the work was recommissioned as Butterfly Portals Reprise, then substantially redesigned and rescaled for presentation at Oklahoma Contemporary on October 19, 2021, in connection with the Philanthropy Southwest conference. The photographs on this page document the original OSU Discovery installation; the reprise is not pictured.