STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
jasna guy (she doesn’t use capital letters) carved out more than a hundred species of bees for a large-scale 40-by-30-foot print depicting tens of thousands of bees and honeycomb images that she printed on silk tissue.
She brought the center portion to be included in the Sun Valley Center for the Arts’ new BIG IDEA “Bees” exhibition, which kicks off with an opening celebration from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, April 13.
“It looks at the history of the honey bee from ancient times,” she said.
Guy didn’t stop with that, however.
She made a sampling of hues that attract pollinators, and that led to large black and white photographic prints of a pollinator plants, dissected to offer a new view of them.
“I have 177 colors in my swatch sample. There are more than 450,000 flowering plants,” she said, referring to the enormity of colors out there.
guy based her drew inspiration from Dorothy Hodges book, “The Pollen Loads of the Honey Bee,” of which she has a first-edition signed copy.
Hodges collected pollen from bees, examining each sample under a microscope to document the pollen by color and form.
“In order to look at pollen, you have to look at plants. That led to my photographs of Monks’ head, pussy willow, foxglove, nodding onion and other plants,” the artist added. “I’ve learned about the incredible lifecycle of 20,000 bees and the incredible variety of pollens in terms of color and shapes. Shapes are as important as color because they dictate what kind of pollinator visits that plant.”
There are three other artists in the show, in addition to guy and Dr. Cameron Cartiere:
MARY EARLY created simple repeating forms from beeswax to create a geometric installation hanging from the ceiling and emitting the fragrance of beeswax in the Project Room gallery.
Boise-based artist KIRSTEN FURLONG has created “Imagined Pollinators,” a two-dimensional wall installation of hand-drawn, hand-cut, artist-invented moths and butterflies.
And renowned photographer EMMET GOWIN’s “Mariposas nocturnas” shows grids of photographs of moths he made during visits to Panama, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana and elsewhere.