Ideal Bounds by Ruth Marsh

The New Gallery is pleased to present "Ideal Bounds” by Ruth Marsh.

Opening reception is Friday, May 20 at 8:00 PM. Admission is free and all are welcome.

A free public discussion and a special screening of “Bee Taxidermy: Reanimation” will take place on Saturday, May 21 at 2:00 PM

Exhibition runs from May 20 to June 25, 2016

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“Ideal Bounds” imagines a hypothetical near-future where the world’s bees have succumbed to colony collapse disorder. This wry, dystopian musing plays with signifiers one finds in present-day museum exhibits depicting species which have become extinct due to human causes.

Ruth Marsh has been creating the multi-disciplinary, community engaged series of works which make up Ideal Bounds, since 2011. Contributions of found, dead bees are mailed to Marsh’s Halifax studio from individuals across Canada. The bees are preserved and meticulously repaired using discarded technology. The newly restored bees are then given life, frame-by-frame, through the process of stop motion animation.

The hundreds of mended and refurbished bees line shelves in the gallery space, each in its own small, glass case. Viewers are further invited to engage with this grotesque narrative by taking in the DIY instructional video Bee Taxidermy: A How To Guide which demonstrates the step-by-step process of restoring one’s own bee. On an opposite wall, the stop-motion work, Reanimate, presents a vision of a cybernetically altered hive populated by bee automatons. a

This work plays with themes of environmental loss through practical, labour intensive and repetitive explorations of radical transformation: life to death, reality to memory and the surrealistic degradation of information that occurs with each successive change of state. What is left after each phase gains more and more the uncanny strangeness of a close yet unfaithful copy and what is created in the end is something else altogether: an irrevocably altered, transubstantiated other.

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In conversation with Dr. Ralph Cartar, Ruth Marsh, and Amber Yano - Saturday, May 21 at 2:00 PM, located at The New Gallery (208 Centre St. SE)

Please join us for a public discussion on pollinators, environment, human impact, and bee decrepitude with Ruth Marsh‘s esteemed guests, Dr. Ralph Cartar (University of Calgary) and Amber Yano (Maple Greenview Honey) for a diverse and interesting cross disciplinary dialogue in response to Marsh’s exhibition. A special screening of “Bee Taxidermy: Reanimation” will take place following the discussion.

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Visit http://www.thenewgallery.org/ideal-bounds/ to read Julie Hollenbach’s exhibition essay and find out more.