Aganetha Dyck‘s exhibition Collaborations on now at the Burnaby Art Gallery is the result of her ongoing dialogue with bees. Her recent Hive Scans were created with the help of her son and his laptop computer. The printed results are very painterly, with blurring stripes that remind me of smeared paint, but which are actually the traces of bees in motion while the scan takes place. These images are very tactile, capturing marks of pollen, honey, and wax left by the bees on the surface of the scanner.
Dyck often takes objects she finds or constructs, and places them in the hive during the bees’ active summer months. Check out her wax-encrusted braille tablets and her striking back-lit manufactured metal plates of text, all of which are a poignant reference to communication between humans and bees.