Ideal Bounds by Ruth Marsh

Opening Reception: Friday September 16th from 7-9pm (Gallery Hop)

Exhibition runs until Monday October 31st, 2016.

Ideal Bounds imagines a hypothetical near-future wherein the world’s bees have perished due to human causes. This wry, dystopian musing combines the signifiers one finds in present-day museum exhibits with the playfulness of stop motion animation to build an uncanny fiction.  This seven minute short imagines a futuristic beehive whose heart has been infected with a technological virus. Cyborg workers attempt to make repairs but are gradually overcome by their mechanical impairments.

White Water Gallery will be converted into a pristine, brightly-lit, Bee Taxidermy museum wherein three hundred mended and refurbished bees line shelves in the gallery space, each in its own small, glass vitrine. Each bee is labeled with a number which corresponds to an entry in a reference booklet, within which museum visitors are invited to look up information provided for each bee. Viewers are further invited to engage with this grotesque narrative by taking in the DIY instructional video Bee Taxidermy: A How To Guide which demonstrates the step-by-step process of restoring one’s own bee.

Ruth Marsh has been creating the multi-disciplinary, community engaged series of works which make up Ideal Bounds, since 2011. Contributions of found, dead bees are mailed to Marsh’s Halifax studio from individuals across Canada. The bees are preserved and meticulously repaired using discarded technology. The newly restored bees are then given life, frame-by- frame, through the process of stop motion animation.

Artist Biography

Ruth Marsh is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Halifax, NS. Her work uses absurd and often comically deadpan narratives to address loss, absence and longing in the context of living creatures and the natural world. She is interested in investigating themes of environmental loss through practical, labour intensive and repetitive explorations of transformation: life to death, reality to memory and the surrealistic degradation of information that occurs with each successive change of state.

Since graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006, her practice has spanned painting, drawing, taxidermy, video, performance, installation and stop-motion animation. Her work has been shown in galleries, museums and festivals in Canada and the US including The New Gallery(Calgary, AB),  The Confederation Centre of the Arts (Charlottetown, PE)  and Worldfest International Film Festival (Houston, TX).

Co-Presented by the Near North Mobile Media Lab and White Water Gallery