In 2017, Jennifer Willet developed a performative alter ego called the Gentleman Scientist, an entertaining and gender fluid critique of the Western tradition of scientific rationality. The Gentleman Scientist is a ringmaster, a specialist, a time traveler, a buffoon, whose once white coat is filthy. He has 8 snow globes attached to the front and back like mutant breasts or egg sacks. Within each snow globe live colonies of microorganisms, bacteria, yeast, algae. They are fascinating, beautiful and putrid.

Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies is a 360° diorama installation installed on a sewing mannequin, which serves as a portrait of a character and a garment as it moves through ecologies and time, all the while accruing microbes and meaning–literal and metaphorical passengers.

Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies, like most of Willet’s practice, challenges hierarchies of truth, knowledge and experience within traditional manifestation of scientific rationality. With innovations in science and technology the future will be measured in multitudes, rather than fact or fiction. Willet’s work proposes iterative feminist, post-colonial, and post-speciesist visions of our shared biotech future that values scientific knowledge and biotech innovation in chorus with social, cultural, aesthetic and non-human knowledges. Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies is a cacophony ecology of human and non-human organisms living, reproducing and dying in a shared laboratory environment.

Original Coat design/fabrication: Shanti Freed for a project in collaboration with Kira O’Reilly.

Coat Modification: Billie Mclaughlin

Coat Train: Daniela Gaie

Project Assistance: Megan Andrews, Justin Elliott, Brodie MacPhail, Domenica Mediati, Hadia Nadeem, Dunia Roba, Nate Talbot.

Acknowledgements: This project gratefully acknowledges the support of Ontario Culture Days and Arts Council Windsor Region, as well as the University of Windsor, the Canada Research Chair Program, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts.