Bee Taxidermy Instructional Video

So, what do you do when you have virtually no technical skill in shooting and editing video or recording audio but you really, really  want to make an instructional video about bee taxidermy? You seek help! What better opportunity to learn these skills but through the Centre for Art Tapes’ Scholarship Program? So I wrote up a proposal and was accepted into the program.

I would recommend this program to anyone. If you have project you dearly want to make but lack the technical camera and computer skills to do it, please please apply for the CFAT Scholarship program! The instructors, CFAT staff and mentors are so patient and welcoming and they took me from the point of not even knowing which button to push to “make the camera go” to being able to now independently produce my own video work.

This program consists of a series of workshops about everything from camera operation to the basics of animation to lighting to sound and video editing. The program climaxes in a public screening of the work that the scholarship participants produce. Scholarship recipients are also given great access to equipment and services available through the centre. Another component consists of being set up with a mentor who, through a series of scheduled studio visits and meetings acts as an instructor and helps to guide you through the process. My assigned mentor was Tim Tracey: self-made filmmaker and DIY ninja extraordinaire! Tim was a wacky and wonderful mentor and it turned out that we worked so well together that we ended up working on another project after the scholarship program concluded. However, I must digress at this point because the project in question will be covered in some detail in a future post.

So here I was with a plan and the ignorant hubris to think my project was a very simple, straightforward endeavor that could easily be completed in a weekend. I expected that after this effortless two days I would put my feet up and sip large, fruity cocktails from coconuts while nodding sympathetically at the other, more ambitious scholars who were toiling away on their Citizens’ Kane. 

I was very soon to learn that this was simply not the case. Apparently shooting in macro can be a bit of a challenge *cough*. Every part of the shoot was incredibly painstaking because, turns out, it’s kind of difficult to shoot video of activities you can’t actually see very well with the naked eye.  Imagine winding a tiny wire onto a tiny needle and then very carefully trying to locate a specific part of a bee’s tiny head to glue it to; all this occurring while one is trying to record the minute sounds this activity might make and trying one’s very best to capture this minute activity on camera. Not to mention lighting: suffice to say that I had never before concentrated more energy on trying not to melt myself or other people. Tears were shed, lessons were learned and fingers were super-glued to other fingers on a semi regular basis. But the video was made, oh yes! No longer would the world’s hobbyists be deprived of the option of preserving and repairing heirloom quality dead bees for their family to treasure for generations to come.

My plan at the time was to exhibit this video alongside several hundred taxidermy bees. I have yet to do this but it is still a very real ambition about which, I will keep you posted!

And so, my darlings, here is my bee taxidermy instructional opus. Like, share and enjoy!

Bee Taxidermy Instructional Video

What constitutes a practice?

(Still from "Hive", Nocturne Art at Night, 2013)

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot in recent months, which has led me to speak to other people on the subject. What are the basic requirements for a person to take on the lofty (or, depending on how you look at it “dubious”) title of “artist”? What is enough? Am I enough? What is an art practice?

The people whom I’d been speaking with all had certain things in common. They were experiencing changes in the practical structure of their lives that were forcing them to contemplate this question. Changes included: loss of a studio space, a lessening of studio time, a creative dry patch where one feels lost and grasping. The one thing that we could all agree on was that, for all of us as creative people, the absence of creative output was the very definition of despair. When the conditions of creating change and seem to become beyond one’s control; it is a very lonely feeling, it can be very damaging to one’s creative confidence and can lead to the questioning of the validity of one’s practice.

In my case, I went through some very drastic and significant life changes which made me grow very rapidly in almost every aspect of my life. As it so happens, these events happened between this post and my last one over the course of more than two years. I don’t need to go into too many specifics but suffice to say, my life opened up and I grew, a lot; and my practice grew along with me. I tried some new directions and learned a lot, the specifics of which I’ll speak of in more detail in upcoming posts over the next few weeks. The aspect that I’d like to concentrate on now however is a more meta examination of change and growth in the context of an art practice.

So what happened? It started in small ways, which I couldn’t really perceive or make sense of at first. I started working in new media and changed my view of myself from “painter” to “multidisciplinary artist”.  I changed my view from an inward one: I make paintings in isolation which represent a core idea and then I present these paintings and ideas in a public exhibition, to one that demanded more give and take: I receive information, ideas and materials from the public and then I use art as a lens to reflect these images and ideas back. I changed my sensibilities toward materials and became much more fluid in my approach. It stopped being about shaping paint to represent ideas and became more about letting the ideas shape the material. This meant that if I had to learn a new skill or even invent a whole new way of creating, I would.

I had always taken a very conscious approach toward materials as a painter. The shape and size of the painting surface were never invisible in my eyes and were always given careful consideration. The paint itself was always carefully considered; I made my own gesso, egg tempera and encaustic paints. So it seemed very natural to expand and grow into new materials and ways of working. The part that changed was that the material had to serve the idea and that the most important aspect of the whole exercise was connecting with other people. So I stopped painting and started drawing on a large scale, making taxidermy bees, helped make a stop motion film and collaborated on a large-scale, public installation.

It was scary and also very exciting! As I changed on a personal level from a very shy human to a more confident and connected one, my work grew too and in doing so I was forced to re-examine my own personal definition of what art actually does and what it is. I know this is a question that has dogged humanity from its very beginning and I don’t pretend to be able to have in a moment of epiphany, stumbled upon the answer to one of life’s great questions. However, as a practitioner of art, I think it’s important to have a working definition. This definition has to be based on a couple of practical considerations: What do I want my art to do and who is its intended audience? For me, suddenly the scope of creating opened up. It stopped being about the physical making of the work and started being about communicating with other people. I felt like I had been given an opportunity to really connect with others in a unique and meaningful way. As a shy and somewhat lonely person this idea was almost overwhelming. Art was love. Art was connection. Art was creating a situation or context within which to have a conversation with other people with give and take and it was ongoing. This became the definition of “practice” for me. As such it could be expanded into all aspects of life, not just in a small studio with a paintbrush!

So what does this mean in the day to day? Well, since art making has become less of an activity and more of a way of experiencing the world, I count the hours I spend in my actual studio less carefully; as though being able to say I’ve been in the studio eight hours a day, seven days a week somehow validates or even indicates the quality of my work. I worry less about identifying as an artist and try to just accept it as a part of my identity; a core value that other things can rest comfortably upon. I try to maintain a deep respect for art-making and therefore, for myself. Some days are easier than others.

This should not imply however, even for a second, that I don’t struggle. I’m a visual artist working a day job in a city that is much too expensive to live in as a low waged worker. I’ve realized how precious time is when so much of my time and energy is caught up just in surviving. It can be brutally hard to motivate yourself to make art at the end of a day when you’ve been on your feet for eight or more hours already, just to pay the bills. I make time in small ways when the practical circumstances of my life demand a lot of my energy and I glory in extended patches of time that can just be dedicated to art. All the while, I try to work constantly toward structuring my life in such a way that eventually I’ll have all the time I need, only for art.

So, dear reader, I hope this explains the lapse in blog making to some extent! More will be filled-in in future posts as I go into more detail about the nuts and bolts of the work I’ve been making recently.  I’m seeing the blog itself more as an extension of my practice and hope to use it as a jumping off point in connecting with you in a more meaningful way than before.  And so, we’ll talk soon!

Assembly Lines Installation

This past Sunday I returned to Halifax from Charlottetown where I had been installing the bee part of Assembly Lines. This exhibition brought four artist's together to show work that, in it's making, had taking highly personally charged subject matter and put it through a repetitive, assembly line type process that somehow depersonalized it.

I was amazed at how friendly and welcoming the Confederation Centre gallery staff and volunteers were. An extra special thanks has to go out to Betty-Jo McCarville and Erin Arsenault who each welcomed me into their homes for two of the four days I was on the Island.

I can't wait to go back to PEI and visit again!

Electric Log

About a year ago I met some new friends who had an interesting bee disappearance related story to tell. They had been keeping bees for a few years when last summer their queen bee and her hive suddenly swarmed one afternoon. These bees then took up residence in a neighbor's rotted tree and were quite comfortably appointed when the neighbor asked that my friends remove the bees. In a move that I consider quite novel they hired an arborist and had him, wearing gear to protect him from the bees, remove the section of tree where the bees were living. They then moved this section back to their property where the bees thrived for quite some time until, one day, quite unexpectedly, they were gone. It's possible the bees simply swarmed again, this time much further afield, it's also possible that they fled their hive and died. Whatever the explanation, they, like many billions of bees all over the world simply disappeared.

All that was left of the bees after this event was their log hive, some abandoned beeswax, and a couple of short videos of them taken by my friends. I was very excited about what in my mind added up to an installation artwork. I soon had my greedy hands on the log hive and video and set about putting these things together to be presented at the Nocturne: Art at Night Festival. Hive was placed within a city garden bed on the corner of Spring Garden Road and South Park Street in Halifax from six pm to midnight on the night of October 15th.

Here's the artist's statement for Hive:

“Hive” is both a monument to the missing bees and what Jean Baudrillard might consider “a perversion of reality”. A viewer may initially be attracted to the hive by the buzzing sound it gives off even at a distance (from speakers placed covertly on the inside). A faint light emitting from the hive’s small entrance issues an invitation to cautiously peer inside. Stooping a little bit to see, the viewer may feel slightly anxious that the buzzing, combined with the way the hive blends naturally into the park setting may indicate the presence of actual bees. What the viewer gets instead is an unfaithful copy. A small screen plays a video of the hive’s former occupants while the scent of the hive’s abandoned comb lingers in the air. What remains is a an artist’s attempt to put humpty dumpty back together again; we can see and smell the bees and touch their hive but what we are experiencing is a copy which only serves to highlight their absence.

New Documentation, Bee Taxidermy

The fabulous and talented Christina Arsenault documented my most recent bees, above are some of the highlights. Sixty eight of these bees as well as an index of information gathered about each of them will be a part of an exhibition at the Confederation Centre of the Arts Art Gallery in Charlottetown, PEI From October 22, 2011- March 04, 2012. The exhibition is called Assembly Lines. It explores the idea of putting work charged with personal meaning through impersonal or repeditive processes. The other artists in the show are Sarah Saunders, Stephen B. MacInnis, and Aaron Weldon.

Corpus Melliferous

The fabulous Christina Arsenault has documented Corpus Melliferous and here are the images of that series of work. The first three drawings shown measure 55''x96'', the round drawing measures 36'' in diameter, the following drawing measures 50'' x 36'' and the remaining three each measure 36'' x 50''. They are predominantly graphite with some ink.

http://www.christinaarsenault.ca/

"May I Have Your Bees Please?" Information Booth and Walking Tours

During the week of August 8th-13th I set up an information booth inside of Eyelevel Gallery as part of their members' weekly show "Biological Society". Between 2:00pm and 4:00pm I held office hours and, three times a day, I lead groups on walking tours of the neighborhood. Member of the group would decide which areas posed a particular hazard to bees and teeny tiny signs were placed in these areas.I would note the locations in a small notebook as well as the reason for the hazard. Upon our return to the gallery a pin would be placed in a map indication these locations. Every person who participated received a free button in their choice of gold or white. It was lovely to see what happens when you ask a stranger to do something so whimsical. The mood of each of the tours ranged from amused to giddy. It was a great week, thank you to everyone who came out for a tour and a conversation.