Between Us

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“Between Us,” no date

installation view (courtesy of the gallery)

Drawings, sculptures, and sound art resulting from inter-species collaborations between artists and honeybees.

Featuring local Prince Albert artists Nicole Charlebois Rinas, Denise Flaman, George Glenn, and Judy McNaughton, as well as SK artists Last Birds, Kelly Litzenberger, Jeff Meldrum, Melanie Monique Rose, Tim Moore, Chantel Schultz, Sylvia Thompson, and Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson. Mentored by Aganetha Dyck.

​Between Us is the culmination of 12 long-term creative relationships between artists, beekeepers and honeybees under the guidance of Aganetha Dyck.

“There are no secrets,” claims artist Dyck, who has co-created artworks with honeybee collaborators for over two decades, “there are only surprises.” The exhibition Between Us is a collection of such surprises arising from interspecies and interdisciplinary collaboration.​

Following their distinctive apian logic, bees transformed objects placed by artists in beehives, embellishing sculptures with beeswax frills, mending gaps with their golden wax, mimicking vessel walls with their own constructions and packing available space with their delicate geometric comb. Through their processes and excretions, honeybees augment the artists’ narratives with records of settlement, family, agriculture, spirituality, the ecology of recycling, the interconnectedness of all species and dependence upon weather and the land.

Between Us refers to the distances and differences between us and what we, as humans and insects, have in common. Between Us invites artists and the public to appreciate bees as conscious and creative agents.

What lies between us?

​In the case of the artists in this exhibition and their mentor, vast prairie distances lie between them. In the fall of 2019, internationally renowned artist Aganetha Dyck proposed mentoring Saskatchewan artists to create artwork with honeybee collaborators. Although Dyck lives in Winnipeg, she became an artist in Prince Albert. Her unique methods of artmaking are rooted in the thrifty self-reliance of her Mennonite heritage, including:

shrinking castoff handknit sweaters into tiny effigies,

preserving buttons using heritage pickling recipes,

and inviting bees to mend broken china or transform discarded objects with their golden wax.

Working with gallery contacts in Prince Albert, Swift Current, Estevan and Yorkton, the Art Gallery of Regina invited twelve artists and collectives from across the province to learn from Dyck.

While the artists’ methods of producing work for Between Us were similar, the resulting work is as varied as the artist themselves.

- Sandee Moore, Curator of Exhibitions and Programming at the Art Gallery of Regina