Aleocharinae: An Entomologist And An Artist

Obscure rove beetles inspire celebration of diversity

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Canadian artist Luann Baker-Johnson has teamed up with biologist Benoit Godin to create a circus inspired by tiny beetles and their tinier insides, enlarging them to our human scale.

The exhibition, on view at the Yukon Arts Centre Gallery now through May 23, 2025, focuses on Aleocharinae, better known as “obscure rove beetles.”

Entitled Aleocharinae: An Entomologist and an Artist, it both celebrates diversity and invites us to imagine the world around us differently.

A cutout of two brightly coloured beetles at the exhibition’s entry way invites viewers into the imaginative exploration. You and a friend can stick your heads through and take pictures.

Beetles are the most diverse animals in what we call the animal kingdom. To the naked eye you would be hard pressed to tell them from a speck of dirt, until they move. The smallest depicted in this show is under a millimetre and most are three to five millimetres. There is at least one specimen of this beetle per square foot of forest litter.

For the frequent trail-walkers who live in Whitehorse, this means we walk with them all the time. Biologists identify the different species of Aleocharinae by the various structures of their genitalia. Two species in the show were first identified by Godin and others at Paddy’s Pond, a green space in Whitehorse, and another from near Wolf Creek.

Baker-Johnson and her husband and high school sweetheart Mel Johnson own and operate Lumel Studios near the Whitehorse waterfront with a dynamic team of fellow glassworkers and an open responsiveness to the people around them. The widest range of people sit at their benches and create, from five to 105 years old. They have an adapted bench so people can wheel in. Baker-Johnson welcomes those she calls river walkers, who are often experiencing homelessness, to try the glass, to take part in studio life. 

So it didn’t surprise me to hear that when Godin walked into the studio and asked Baker-Johnson if he could create beetle genitalia with her, in blown glass, Baker-Johnson was game. A video created by the Yukon Arts Centre draws viewers into the show, where we meet Baker-Johnson and Godin and see them at work in the glass studio with the Lumel team, intercut with their reflections. We come to understand that these shapes offered a unique technical challenge to Baker-Johnson’s hot glass skills, where truth was stranger than fiction.

Most of the exhibition consists of three-part interpretations. Godin presents a species of Aleocharinae mounted on a pin in a shadow box, using scientific conventions of labelling. Then we confront the radical uniqueness of a blown glass rendition of the beetle’s genital structure, created collaboratively between the two artists, with Baker-Johnson and her team as the hands and Godin as the eyes. A larger artistic rendition of the beetle by Baker-Johnson, sized to match its glass interior, fleshes out the interpretation. Baker-Johnson uses painting, sculpture, and sometimes a combination of the two, to depict the beetles. The largest, painted on Tyvek, shows us the beetle 1500 times the actual size, and stretches from the gallery ceiling down along the gallery floor well into the space. 

There is an Alice in Wonderland sense to this project. It opens a door to wonder as we expand our imaginations to apprehend that we live in a world with this kind of diversity at our feet, smaller than we can see. This is an important gesture in our times. For me, hope comes from the possibility that we can work together from diverse perspectives. This is what Godin and Benoit-Johnson have done. ■

Luann Baker-Johnson and Benoit Godin, Aleocharinae: An Entomologist and an Artist, is on view at Yukon Arts Centre Gallery now through May 23, 2025.

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