Many thanks to Kylee Nunn, a brilliant local photographer, for the dreamy documentation of the installed piece. |
I think we all, as creative people have our dream projects
that given the opportunity, we simply must make. Hive is and was one of those projects for me. As I’ve mentioned
before, art-making, at its core for me is creating an opportunity for others to
see the world in a different way. Providing a situation of right-brain-strangeness and the subsequent dialogue about this strangeness is
definitely one of the things that gives me the most pleasure in life.
Hive has been an
idea at the back of my mind for the past four or five years. It would provide
an all encompassing, overwhelming, full sensory experience for a broad public
audience. The basic idea consisted of creating a large-scale installation where
visitors would be given the opportunity to experience the darkness, warmth, sound,
sights, smells and vibrations of a living beehive. As one small person with a
lot of creative scope but with limited skills in the audio-visual world of
sound and video projections this project had been just outside of my grasp but
always on my mind.
Fast forward to last Winter when I had the great pleasure of
getting to know Jeff Wheaton. The art world is a very small place, compound
that reality a few times by the fact that Halifax is a tiny place and another
few times by the fact that artists whose work obsesses particularly on bees are
almost certainly bound to cross paths and there you have it, an inevitable collaboration!
Jeff was the filmmaker in residence with the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative.
The film that he was creating for the residency was, non-coincidentally, also
called Hive. This film is a gorgeous,
gorgeous creation and features my bee taxidermy as part of the storyline. I
strongly encourage you to check it out, but I digress. Turns out that Jeff and
I had both been tapping into the bee ether and both wanted to make a large
scale installation along similar lines and so we decided to join forces and
create a piece for Nocturne Art at Night, 2013.
Through a lot of brainstorming over the next months we
slowly came up with a workable concept for Hive. The idea of a full sensory experience was at
the core of each of our ideas, it was just exactly how this would take physical
form that needed a little bit of smoothing out. As the naive dreamer I would
wildly shoot out my ideas and Jeff , who knew what equipment and tools we would
actually need to achieve our goals, would accurately point out that we
“…weren’t Cirque de Soleil”. In very
short order we agreed on the idea that became Hive. A large yurt, 28’ in
diameter would make up the shell of our hive. We would then build a large
cylinder that would occupy the centre of the inside of the yurt. This cylinder would be constructed of organic
cotton and wouId be fully impregnated with beeswax which, turns out, is a great
surface to back-project video! Inside the cylinder three projectors would play
original footage from Jeff’s backyard beehives (Did I mention that Jeff is an
award winning cinematographer?) while several large speakers would pump out
sound that was also recorded directly from these hives. The rest of the yurt
would be blacked out so that the viewer’s full attention would be drawn to the
centre and, we hoped, they would become lost in the experience.
Here's a process shot of the cylinder set up in a big warehouse with Jeff for scale. |
So this is exactly what we ended up making and it existed as
an installation for six hours on the night of October 19th, 2013 in
the Atlantic Filmmaker’s Cooperative parking lot at 5663 Cornwallis Street in
North End Halifax. Jeff and I both donned beekeeping outfits and were present
to “tend” our hive and field questions about it for the duration of the
installation. Hundreds of people came out to see our strange beehive and we had
many rewarding conversations with many of the hive’s temporary inhabitants.
A huge shout out of thanks to Martha Cooley and the staff, board and volunteers at the Atlantic Filmmaker's Cooperative who made this project possible through providing a venue, equipment, technical expertise and support.
A huge shout out of thanks to Martha Cooley and the staff, board and volunteers at the Atlantic Filmmaker's Cooperative who made this project possible through providing a venue, equipment, technical expertise and support.
I hope to recreate this project in a gallery setting or at a
festival again soon. Ill keep you posted about this, oh yes!