CULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY Respect for diversity is a thread that runs through much of Giammatei’s work, although occasionally subtle. Her inspiration for painting the large telescope at the Lick Observatory, besides a fascination with science, was to celebrate and illustrate how we all look at the world from different vantage points and perspectives. Another large acrylic—of the U.S.S. Midway aircraft carrier bridge—which she created for the Midway Museum is entitled “There’s Room to Help Steer,” and Giammatei interprets it as a call for people to work together. She has created acrylic paintings of ants, flies, beetles, and silk moths and botanically accurate cards with mushroom images, spotlighting unique and less commonly photogenic creatures to reflect her fascination with the variety of life on earth. NATURE, ECOLOGY, AND TECHNOLOGY Giammatei’s nature and ecology-inspired paintings also touch upon environmental themes, such as species extinction, and suggest that humans can become a biohazard when we do not treat nature with respect. Other “biohazard” themed works ask us to think about the risks we pose to our food supply through pesticides or other contamination. Other paintings look at our relationship to technology, exploring how we mediate our experience of the wilderness through social media or how artificial intelligence may eventually interpret and categorize human beings. There’s a winged sculpture hooked up to a fan echoing the Greek myth of Icarus, questioning whether our tech has empowered us to fly too close to the sun and thus fall to our destruction, and a metallic-colored “altered diary” with commentary suggesting that we lose some control of our personal narratives when they become completely digital.
This philosophy shows up in her felt illustrations of the substances delivered through mental health medications such as Ritalin, “Take Them If You Need Them,” and her DNA images, “Don’t Let Genetics Get You Down.” Comparing mental health care to other sorts of repair de-stigmatizes mental health issues. And, by mentioning “differences” and “superpowers” alongside “ailments,” Giammatei signals that her work acknowledges the perspectives of those who feel their brain differences are simply natural human variations as well as those who see themselves as suffering from illness. The language she uses highlights her belief that mental healthcare should be about individual people working with their bodies and brains to build lives that work for them rather than meeting a single standard of “functioning.” In keeping with the concept of personal choice and self-definition, she places a representation of an estrogen molecule at a table setting, showing that we should be able to show up and make sense of gender in whatever way works for us.
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