Class Trips: Exhibits

The works at 11 Rivington, inspired by its own sense of "randomness", felt like visual betrayal. "Nature" branding his works, seemed to me a little misleading: I could almost picture bees in a box, building around the metal framing that the artist provided, creating a curtain on an otherwise unspectacular site.

What really captured my curiosity, though, was the seductive sensibility that the evolution of these particular forms revealed. An evolution birthed out of some social process of building that created, within its remarkable symmetry, pockets of rebellion where a small group of bees decided to "build differently". In "Programmed Hive #8", I could see small bulges of nest built out of diligence, and perhaps frustration, reacting to those genetically-induced processes of building and growth that underly their existence.

Berseth's hives also induce me to contemplate nature as experimentation. BIOMIMICRY - a field devoted to understanding the relationship of biological processes to human design processes.  I wonder, what would have happened if Berseth, once the hive had been well established, moved it out of a box and into a tree, where elements of weather would have exposed the bees to a new context in which to create? What would living in a bee hive be like, if you constructed an entire small edifice out of their honeycomb? What happens around the same programmed aluminum frame if the artist turns it upside down? The project reflects the rawness of the pseudo-natural (after all, is anything natural once removed from nature?), and exposes the limited understanding I have of its ways.