12 FEBRUARY 2-8, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | This piece is just like the bike ride: It was the biggest I could go,” Lemanski says. “I can’t get material bigger. They don’t make plastic bigger. There’s plywood in the back; they don’t make it bigger. I can’t get an image printed any larger. I took it as far as I possibly could. “You know the concept of the hero’s journey, right? That’s what I did,” he con- tinues. “I went on a hero’s journey on that bike ride. And the last part of the hero’s journey is the elixir that you come home with. Like, what do you have? What knowledge do you have to share? I came back and I built the world’s largest. trip- piest ant farm in this — and this, this, is the elixir.” Lemanski has a tentative plan for “The Shoreline of Sanity” that has made the ant- keeping community on Red- dit question his sanity. He’s been mulling over the idea of nesting several queens to cre- ate multiple colonies in one farm that’s far too big to have a single queen. “I’m gonna put multiple queens in there, and they’re just going to be at war,” he says with a somewhat nervous laugh. “There’s some- thing dark about that, which is why I haven’t done it yet. There’s gonna be an endless ant war in here, with this beau- tiful space background. You know, they’re just interesting to look at. It’s an endless world unfolding in front of you.” This is not the only idea of Lemanski’s that’s alarmed ant lovers on Reddit. “I actually get a lot of pushback from them,” he admits. “With ant-keeping, the idea is to keep a queen and watch the queen lay babies and have a whole colony and to keep them healthy. They keep them in a plastic box; there’s no soil or anything. So they see me using potting soil, or not having a queen in one farm, or they’ll be like, ‘The lights bother the ants!’ “The ant-keeping community doesn’t like what I’m doing,” he adds. “Some of them think it’s cool, but a lot of them are like, ‘That’s not the point of it.’” He knows that the contained ant war will make those people lose their minds, but “unless you’re, like, a vegan without pets,” he says, “I don’t think they have a leg to stand on.” Ant Life is fi lled with peaceful spots, though Lemanski has never been big into alcohol or going out, which is part of why he wanted to create a place for like-minded people who prefer more intimate, deep experiences. There are plenty of activities to keep them occupied. Hula hoops hanging on a pole in the center of the main room invite play, while bean bags patterned similarly to the space screens encourage lounging. Anyone who uses psychedelics would consider the mas- sage chair a major perk. Another detail trip- pers would appreciate: a wooden table that Lemanski built with six legs, “like an ant.” Color-changing light bars illuminate the light spaces and space screens, which can provide hours of entertainment for spunions. The screens are printed from photographs Lemanski takes or sources from Google Earth or government images, such as the Hubble, which he then puts through the algorithm and Photoshop process that he uses for the ant farm backdrops. “I consider these closer to nature pho- tography,” he says, gesturing to his space screens. “I need to go out and fi nd it. On the far left there, that’s a photograph of a broken tree branch I took. Just to the right of that one is a satellite image from Google Earth looking down at the mountains.” You wouldn’t be able to identify the broken tree branch, though; it appears more like an eerily symmetrical abstract painting. Ant Life visitors discuss his art as they would a Kandinsky at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, asking each other what they see and how it makes them feel, Lemanski says. His pièce de résistance is in the back room, behind the fi nal wall. A beanbag chair is positioned directly in front of a large, back- lit, algorithm-twisted symmetric image with a color-changing light highlighting different pigments. “This is a piece I made a thousand days after my thousand-day bike ride,” he says. “After going, going, going for a thousand days, I just took a moment to refl ect on what I did in the mirror time frame. And I created a place so beautiful, I was compelled to stay. And that’s what I’ve been doing: I’ve sat and looked at this for 100 hours, at least.” He created the work off of a Hubble image that captured space fi fty light-years away. “It has a center point you can focus on,” Lemanski says. “So when you’re sober — but especially if you’re tripping — you can hang on to that point, and it creates a sort of hallucination effect on the edges.” As with a Rorschach test, each viewer identifi es some- thing unique. A doctor who came in pointed out how it refl ected human anatomy, he says. A friend who is a farmer sees pigs; another friend who loves dogs sees, well, dogs. Lemanski considers it a self- portrait of sorts, with several “celestial beings.” For now, though, you can only see the interior of Ant Life if you’re going to a private event there. Lemanski admits the space has had a bumpy time finding its footing. “I don’t know how to make money,” he says. “I’m an engineer. I’m not really a businessperson.” When he opened Ant Life, he was relying a bit on the Field of Dreams theory: If he built it, the trippy people would even- tually come. “My initial concept was to be open to the public, and I opened to the public, but I quickly realized I wasn’t allowed to be open to the public,” he says. “This is my fi rst time ever opening a business. Basically, the police showed up, and they said, ‘Where’s your business license to operate as a business like this?’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ ... My concept was never to have alcohol in here, so I just gave them a tour of my gallery, and they were like, ‘Here’s a ticket. Go to the courthouse. You gotta get your business license.’” He had to pay a $600 fee and do 24 hours of community service for operating without the proper license. Lord of the Ants continued from page 10 continued on page 14 As the ants build their landscapes, they create living works of art displayed at Ant Life. EVAN SEMÓN COURTESY OF ANTLIFE
