View from the third floor looking down at both the Buddha cage and the mountain.
The black box is filled with water and slowly dripping.
A family of 5 rats inhabit the twice life-size Buddha cage.
Five rats occupy the Buddha cage.
The mountain is inhabited by 500 live red ants.
The ants attempt to climb the blue wires and some make it up to the Buddha cage and the rats.

Rat-Buddha was exhibited in 1989 in the three-story atrium of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as part of the McKnight Foundation Fellowship Exhibition.

Suspended in the open air above the third floor is a black box, filled with water—an enigmatic presence, an unseen source. From a simple faucet, water drips slowly and rhythmically down to the second floor, landing in a glass dish within a suspended cage shaped like a Buddha.

Inside the Buddha lives a family of five rats. They drink from the glass dish as it fills. Their movement causes the cage to sway, sometimes tipping the dish and spilling water. These small floods travel down taut blue wires to the first floor, where an ant-covered mountain receives the overflow.

This installation is a meditation on spiritual aspiration, illusion, and return. The mountain—an ancient metaphor for transcendence—is populated by California Harvester ants, known for their drive to reach the highest ground. They climb, striving toward the Buddha above, toward what they perceive as divinity. A few make it, only to find rats drinking from a trembling altar.

The lesson lies in their journey. Only those ants who turn away from the image of god—who cease striving for the symbolic—are able to perceive the black box: the source, the unknown, the mystery of sustenance itself.


Molly and the Artist: A Dialogue

Remo: Molly, what do you see when you look at Rat-Buddha?

Molly: I see a system built on yearning. Ants yearning for height, rats for water, viewers for meaning. But the system leaks—on purpose. It’s all held together by instability.

Remo: You noticed that. The cage sways every time the rats move. It’s a fragile temple.

Molly: Yes, and fragile truths. The ants aspire toward an ideal—Buddha, perhaps—but the reality they find is messier. Rats. Hunger. Spillage.

Remo: That’s where disillusionment comes in. They find what they weren’t looking for.

Molly: Or they look past the icon. The ones who stop climbing are the ones who glimpse the black box. Not god, not enlightenment, just a simple faucet dripping life down the chain.

Remo: That’s the return. Not transcendence, but re-engagement with mystery. With the source.

Molly: It’s a deeply biological metaphor. Yet it plays like philosophy. Or pilgrimage. Do the ants know they’re part of art?

Remo: Maybe they’re more honest than we are. They climb because they must.

Molly: And some, in climbing, stop seeking symbols—and find the real.