installation

These objects emerge from a series of works about honeybees and about the plight of pollinators more broadly. In them, hot beeswax is poured directly onto sounding speakers and the results are captured as both video and audio.

A multisensory meditation on human disruption of pollinator ecology that includes sculpture, immersive sound, and video. A central tapestry of wall-mounted steel plates forms a rough map of US states that are recording bee populations. Eight fragrant beeswax speakers emit the spatialized sound of burning honey – each sizzling sound that emerges, played at a volume that at times teeters on the edge of audibility, links to one of the steel plates which bears the charred honey remains. A peculiar box, lined with orange acoustic foam is, in fact, the small sound stage where the honey was burned and recorded. Finally, in a large video projection, bees crawling across the surface of a hive are reduced to wisps of smoke. The Archive includes comfortable lounging platforms that invite visitors to linger and listen.

COLONY is an immersive sound installation that probes the complex relationship between bees and humans. It weaves together recordings of bees with interviews that explore our co-existence with these insects as well as our compulsion to understand them through a human lens. Voices include a blind beekeeper; a social practice artist who created an installation of hives in the shape of the notorious Pruitt Igoe housing complex; an architect designing a bee sanctuary in Tanzania; an author of a book about being raised among bees; and a Michigan beekeeper working in the field. All reverb applied in the work was recorded live in the cold war era surveillance radar station in Port Austin Michigan.