Thoughts on Honeybees

The same day I was in Toronto doing my last-minute viewing at MKG127, I also had the chance to catch Adrianne Rubenstein’s first solo show at Board of Directors. I had previously viewed her earlier drawings in a group show at the same gallery and was appropriately blown away by her tangled compositions of colour-shifting linework, building playgrounds for near-skeletal, gem-like honeybees.

Adrianne Rubenstein, Untitled, 2009

Rubenstein’s newest drawings continue to address the interconnectedness of honeybees to the planetary ecosystem, and more specifically the strange phenomenon of their recent disappearance. Bee populations have plummeted since 2006, and while there are any number of possible reasons - from climate change to parasitic disease to elaborate universe-destroying Dalek machinations - the underlying cause of this devastation remains unknown.

It is therefore fitting that Rubenstein’s most recent drawings here have become far more subtle creations, still evocative of the hive but without the explicit markers of the bees themselves. Her elaborately fused landscapes of line are emptied worlds, self-perpetuating but closed off at their edges, signaling a finite end to their growth.

Stephanie Vegh, Age of Enlightenment (Twilight of the Artisan), 2009

What I particularly respond to in Rubenstein’s drawings is the correspondence between her subject matter and her use of drawing as repetitive labour. Honeybees are themselves emblematic of work on account of their diligent productivity; it is a process that is imitated in the very nature of Rubenstein’s drawings, even with their evident sense of play. That intensity of repetition is unavoidable in dealing with bees when they function best in a swarm; it’s the same rationale that’s led me to adopt honeybees as the invasive subject of my latest series of book-based drawings. By transporting the bees as oversized monsters in the Age of Enlightenment, my approach is far less ecologically-minded than Rubenstein’s and a lot more like an episode of Doctor Who, but at a time when the cause of the disappearing bees remains uncertain, all things are possible.

Adrianne Rubenstein’s Galapagos is on view at Board of Directors until July 18.

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