Swarm

"Just a bee sting," said the nurse drawing blood, triggering a cascade of associations for the artist, from childhood memories to the then personal and political exigencies of the early 1990s: Remembering an especially humid summer morning; my brother and I painstakingly working our way into a blackberry thicket to reach the ripest fruit. It’s very still. Until it isn’t. Stepping on a ground nest of angry wasps, all hell dislodged itself. While the limbic part of our brains triggered fight or flight responses, our minds encountered a different dilemma. Options in a millisecond. Faced with continually being stung or being shredded by the maze of enormous thorns, rational consciousness kicked in to slow things down. Zombies, playing dead to stay alive, we slowly backed our asses out of the briars. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — I was stung the least and screamed the most. Otherwise, it causes trauma — my brother remains prone to anaphylactic shock in response to insect bites to this day.  Seque to the plague years. By the time I reached San Francisco after leaving New York City during the AIDS crisis around 1983, parades on the east coast proclaimed with industrial militancy that Silence = Death. Whereas, on the left coast, buoyed, perhaps, by more mascara, the abridged slogan affirmed that Action = Life. Years of epithets and epitaphs followed, as the specter of acres of kitsch on casket-sized quilts lay festooned on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Hand sewn quilted panels of the AIDS memorial, the closest many had to funerals. "Swarm," an installation of sculptures made out of bees, wax comb, honey and venom expresses more this kind of stream of consciousness than any kind of resolved comprehension of the situation's magnitude. In this exhibition an expansive surrogate body is laid out in a staged and lateral way, allowing the audience to inhabit various experiential thresholds, which in turn reference each other. “Initiation,” an oversized apothecary jar containing 250 pounds of seductively glowing honey, both masks and magnifies, blurs and brings into focus its troubling contents according to how the audience physically navigates around it. The titular piece “Swarm,” similarly reveals a shadowy felt outline of a couple spooning in bed — which can only be fully seen and resolved by viewing the silhouette on its wax comb mattress of hatching bees — via an overhead traffic and surveillance mirror. Each vignette tries to describe how thick the fear and love was then. This installation in its entirety was originally exhibited in 1993 at The Lab in San Francisco, CA. Sculptural tableaus from this series then traveled to Highways Exhibition Space in Santa Monica, CA; Rita Dean Gallery in San Diego, CA; Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, IL; and Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT from 1994 to 1995; as well as being featured at Artists Space in New York, NY in 1996.