MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Partnering with Cameron Cartiere and the chART Collective as part of their ongoing project Border Free Bees, The Center worked with community volunteers to make paper embedded with native pollinator plant seeds. 3,333 bees were cut from the paper and installed on The Center’s walls and ceiling alongside 6,667 bees from earlier Border Free Bees projects. In June, The Center’s staff and volunteers will lay the sheets from which the bees were cut on The Center Lot, alongside other plant starts and seeds, to emerge into a pollinator pasture over the summer. The Center commissioned artist Mary Early to create a site-specific installation in its Project Room gallery. Working with beeswax, Early has used simple, repeating forms and shapes to create a geometric installation that hangs from the ceiling. Visitors are invited to move through the space, taking in the fragrance of beeswax as they experience the installation. Boise-based artist Kirsten Furlong’s Imagined Pollinators is a two-dimensional wall installation of hand-drawn, hand-cut, artist-invented moths and butterflies. The project represents human imagination and empathy as powerful tools in protecting species that are vitally important to us. The exhibition features a selection of renowned photographer Emmet Gowin’s Mariposas nocturnas, grids of photographs of moths Gowin has made during visits to Panama, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana and elsewhere. Depicting hundreds, if not thousands, of species, Gowin’s project illuminates the incredible diversity among pollinators and gives viewers the opportunity to see pollinators who do their work primarily at night, largely hidden from human view. jasna guy has created several bodies of work about bees, including large-scale prints on silk tissue of tens of thousands of bees and honey-comb images. Recently, she’s begun making photographic prints of a wide variety of pollinator plants, sampling their pollen as part of her process and presenting the range of hues in swatches of color.
