Wednesday, June 8, 2022

These are a Few of Our Favourite Bees





So I haven't been posting much recently, but I've been busily preparing for this collective art show about bees. If you're in Toronto, I hope you'll come check it out!


Exhibition
Campbell House Museum  
June 22 - July 16, 2022 

160 Queen Street W.

Opening event 
Campbell House,
Saturday July 2,  
2 – 4 p.m.

Artists' Talk & Webcast
The Canadian Music Centre, 
 
20 St. Joseph Street Toronto 
Thursday, July 7
7:30 – 9 p.m.
(doors open 7 pm)

Co-presented by Art-Sci Salon & The Canadian Music Centre

These are a Few of Our Favourite Bees investigates wild, native bees and their ecology through playful dioramas, video, audio, relief print and poetry. Inspired by lambe lambe – South American miniature puppet stages for a single viewer – four distinct dioramas convey surreal yet enlightening worlds where bees lounge in cozy environs, animals watch educational films and ethereal sounds animate bowls of berries (having been pollinated by their diverse bee visitors). Displays reminiscent of natural history museums invite close inspection, revealing minutiae of these tiny, diverse animals, our native bees. From thumb-sized to extremely tiny, fuzzy to hairless, black, yellow, red or emerald green, each native bee tells a story while her actions create the fruits of pollination, reflecting the perpetual dance of animals, plants and planet. With a special appearance by Toronto's official bee, the jewelled green sweat bee, Agapostemon virescens!

These are a Few of Our Favourite Bees Collective are:

Sarah Peebles, Ele Willoughby, Rob Cruickshank & Stephen Humphrey
The Works

These are a Few of Our Favourite Bees

Sarah Peebles, Ele Willoughby, Rob Cruickshank & Stephen Humphrey
Single-viewer box theatres, dioramas, sculpture, textile art, macro video, audio transducers, poetry, insect specimens, relief print, objects, electronics, colour-coded DNA barcodes.

Bees represented: rusty-patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis); jewelled green sweat bee (Agapostemon virescens); masked sweat bee (Hylaeus annulatus); leafcutter bee (Megachile relativa)

In the Landscape

Ele Willoughby & Sarah Peebles
paper, relief print, video projection, audio, audio cable, mixed media  

 Bee specimens & bee barcodes generously provided by Laurence Packer – Packer Lab, York University; Scott MacIvor – BUGS Lab, U-T Scarborough; Sam Droege – USGS; Barcode of Life Data Systems; Antonia Guidotti, Department of Natural History, Royal Ontario Museum