These Are a Few of Our Favourite Bees
June 22 – July 16, 2022
Our Favourite Bees Collective: Sarah Peebles, Ele Willoughby, Rob Cruickshank & Stephen Humphrey.
Opening Event at Campbell House Museum: Saturday, July 2, 2-4 pm
Co-presented by Campbell House Museum, Art-Sci Salon & Canadian Music Centre
Artists Talk and Webcast at the Canadian Music Centre: Thursday, July 7, 7:30-9 pm
20 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, doors open at 7 pm
Pollinator Walk, July 16, 2 pm
Stephen Humphrey, one of the presenters for These Are a Few of Our Favourite Bees, will be hosting a “pollinator walk” where participants will discover wild bees and other pollinators at work in the garden’s flower patches. Your ticket includes admission to Campbell House to explore the museum’s special exhibits.
BUY TICKETS HERE: Eventbrite – Pollinator Walk
These Are a Few of Our Favourite Bees investigates wild, native bees and their ecology through playful dioramas, video, audio, relief print and poetry. Inspired by lambe lambe – South American miniature puppet stages for a single viewer – four distinct dioramas convey surreal yet enlightening worlds where bees lounge in cozy environs, animals watch educational films, and ethereal sounds animate bowls of berries (having been pollinated by their diverse bee visitors). Displays reminiscent of natural history museums invite close inspection, revealing minutiae of these tiny, diverse animals, our native bees. From thumbsized to unbelievably tiny, fuzzy to hairless, black, yellow, red or emerald green – each native bee tells a story while her actions create the fruits of pollination, reflecting the perpetual dance of animals, plants and planet. With a special appearance by Toronto’s official bee, the jewelled green sweat bee, Agapostemon virescens!
Works:
These Are a Few of Our Favourite Bees
Sarah Peebles, Ele Willoughby & Rob Cruickshank with contributions from Stephen Humphrey
Media: single-viewer box theatres, dioramas, sculpture, textile art, macro video, audio transducers, poetry,
insect specimens, relief print, objects, electronics, colour-coded DNA barcodes
In the Landscape
Sarah Peebles & Ele Willoughby
Media: video projection, audio, paper, relief print, audio cable, mixed media
Without a Bee, It Would Not Be
June 22 – July 16, 2022
Artist Statement
In May, my crabapple tree blooms. In August, I pick the ripe crabapples. In September, I make jelly. Then I have breakfast. This would not be without a bee.
It could not be without a bee. The fruit and vegetables I enjoy eating, as well as the roses I admire as centrepieces, all depend on pollination.
Our native pollinators and their habitat are threatened. Insect populations are declining due to habitat loss, pesticide use, disease and climate change. 75% of flowering plants rely on pollinators to set seed and we humans get one-third of our food from flowering plants.
I invite you to enter this beautiful dining room and consider the importance of pollinators to the enjoyment of your next meal.
Bio
Tracey Lawko employs contemporary textile techniques to showcase changes in our environment. Building on a base of traditional hand-embroidery, free-motion longarm stitching and a love of drawing, her representational work is detailed and “drawn with thread”. Her nature studies draw attention to our native pollinators as she observes them around her studio in the Niagara Escarpment. Many are stitched using a centuries-old, three-dimensional technique called “Stumpwork”.
Tracey’s extensive exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at leading commercial galleries and public museums. Her work has been selected for major North American and International exhibitions, including the Concours International des Mini-Textiles, Musée Jean Lurçat, France, and is held in the permanent collection of the US National Quilt Museum and in private collections in North America and Europe.
Exposed Interiors
April 1 – May 29, 2022
Campbell House Museum invites the public to view Exposed Interiors, an exhibit by artist Gord Peteran of over 30 multi-media artworks arranged in surprising juxtapositions with the museum’s collection. Visitors will explore the “obsessions in our possessions” through a series of interventions within the historic and antique-furnished spaces of 200-year-old Campbell House in downtown Toronto,
Peteran’s reinvented fitments of the home help us exhume the myriad of subliminal narratives and encoded messages the past has to offer, hovering like ghosts hidden, in plain sight. In the artist’s words:
My artwork is fueled by history. While this is not uncommon among artists, I specifically target the historical decorative arts, and the idea that furnishing is a primal inclination that maps our psychology more than it coddles the body. Our obsessions are in our possessions, always have been, always will be.
As we currently probe the past for answers to our sometimes sordid behaviour, I believe that just below the surface of historical glamour, design and craftsmanship are darker truths – and brighter truths – still at work, still operating on us now, still forging and foraging the political, cultural and personal future we require.
I’m chasing that.
The past can still prod and nag us . . . if we let it.
Gord Peteran will be in attendance for two “Meet the Artist” drop-in sessions from 2 pm to 4:30 pm on April 9 and April 23. There will be an Artist Talk on May 12, 6pm, ticket $10. Pre-register here: eventbrite.ca/e/exposed-interiors-artist-talk-tickets-306482105227
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Artist Gord Peteran’s boundary-crossing approach brings a fresh perspective on furniture, sculpture, and the human condition.
Peteran has completed hundreds of private, corporate, and public commissions. He has also lectured and exhibited extensively throughout North America.
While a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University for over 25 years, Peteran also taught at the California College of the Arts, Sheridan College, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He has been the recipient of numerous Arts Council awards from all levels of government, including the Jean A. Chalmers National Arts Award and a Jean A. Chalmers Arts Fellowship.
In 2001 he was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Art Gallery of Guelph have published books on his work.
His work is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin, Royal Ontario Museum, and Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Peteran asks us to look again at both our past and present ‘objects of desire’.