Beesworks

September 2 – October 2

Monday-Friday, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM

Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:

“From 11 am – 12 pm Monday – Friday, the artist will be working alone in the gallery. During this time the gallery will be closed. We invite you to watch through the Sharp Gallery’s glass doors and windows.

Beeswax is the concrete, steel, and glass of the bee nest. Bees must ingest and metabolize twenty pounds of honey to make one pound of wax. Bees manipulate wax with their mandibles and add enzymes and saliva to the mix.

To convert nectar to honey, a bee regurgitates nectar as many as two hundred times to raise the sugar level. She also must fan her wings up to 226, 400 times over the comb to evaporate the water.

Similarly the artist labors over her creations contributing energy, tenacity, and time.
Beeswax is the concrete, steel, and glass of the bee nest. Bees must ingest and metabolize twenty pounds of honey to make one pound of wax. Bees manipulate wax with their mandibles and add enzymes and saliva to the mix.

To convert nectar to honey, a bee regurgitates nectar as many as two hundred times to raise the sugar level. She also must fan her wings up to 226, 400 times over the comb to evaporate the water.

Similarly the artist labors over her creations contributing energy, tenacity, and time. “

Beeswax Wrapper Workshop

September 23, 4:45-5:45 PM

Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:

“Come make beeswax wrappers with SITE Galleries! In conjunction with the exhibition Beesworks artist Olya Salimova will guide participants through the process of making beeswax wrappers, a natural, reusable alternative to plastic wrap. Beesworks will be on view in Sharp Gallery from Thursday, September 2nd – Saturday, October 2nd. Workshop is limited to 10 participants on a first come first serve basis.”

Examining Systems

October 21, 4:00-6:00 PM

Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:

“This first program of the Talking Points exhibition is a performance night featuring pieces by Luis Mejico, Jae Hwan Lim, and Liz Vitlin. All three artists will present pieces that interrogate systems of knowledge against the frame of politics. Each piece utilizes a distinct performance methodology, presenting multiple modes of challenging structures of power. Jae Hwan Lim’s work, With You, isolates the physicality of politicians’ gestures as a means to analyze their sinerity and authenticity. In Luis Mejico’s work, Pedagogy of the Positive, the artist takes on the entirety of North American Educationsal systems with the intent to provide a more reasonable alternative. Liz Vitlin will present, Presidential Astrology, a performative lecture that provides as astrological reading of each candidate’s birth chart to predict the 2016 preseidential election. Either in confronting systems hypervisible or obscured, these artists question, expand, and complicate our understanding of the contemporary political landscape.”

‘In complete world’ by Shelly Silver, screening and community gathering

October 28, 4:00-6:00 PM

Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:

“‘In complete world’ is a feature length documentary made by the artist and filmmaker, Shelly Silver, set against the backdrop of New York during the U.S. presidential election of 2008. Silver provides us with an extraordinary document of the uneasy space identity politics occupy within a democracy, posing a host of pervasive questions to her interviewees; ‘Are you satisfied? Are we responsible for the government we have? Waht do you think our goernment should be doing for you personally? …Do you vote?’ The film questions politics framed through the notion of class politics, drawing the essence of the masses through individual portraits that function as ‘real’ testimonies on film. The continuity between individual and collective responsibility moves us to consider how we as citizens within the school reflect on our own outward and inward journeys during this corresponding political moment eight years later in American politics. This screening was been made possible by the Video Data Bank. Moderated by Pia Singh (MA 2017).”

Performative Panel Discussion

November 2, 4:00 PM

Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:

“Performative Panel Discussion led by Marcela Torres (MFA 2017) // Every four years the U.S. performs the ritual of electing a president, a personwho can tactfully lead our great nation towards progress. Individual communities throughout the U.S. evaluate what progress means to them and select candidates who they believe most resemble these traits and ideologies. These candidates then perform and embody these beliefs. They continue to perform the traits that made them viable to their constituents, but also try to prove to other communities that they are trustworthy and have their interests in mind. This performing of virtue becomes so over the top that the candidates seem to be performing near absurdity. Within this panel I would like to invesigate the process of creating an ideology and what it means and looks like to try to fit a live person into a hypothetical space. and whether judgement is ever satisfied or if it inherently changes the second we approach it. Using the farme of the art world and the platform of Talking Points, artists and art historians stand-in as political officials in this discussion as a method of examining how we posture ourselves to our audiences.”