WINNIPEG – Aganetha Dyck was checking her exhibit at the Winnipeg Art Gallery one day when she saw two people making a beeline toward the wedding dress, the centerpiece of The Extended Wedding Party.
The people were “terribly excited” at first, she said. “But they came within 10 feet, stopped in horror, and turned around and left. They were so scared!”
The wedding dress in question is a life-size glass torso in a plexiglass case, filled and encrusted with honeycombs. The dress is alive and buzzing with about 200,000 honeybees. Surrounding the bride are the other members of the wedding party. All their garments are made from fabric that bees have worked on.
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The gallery smells of honey, and lighting casts small, moving shadows on the floor. The sight of the bees crawling over the torso is “discomforting” to some people. “The buzz is amazing sometimes. It’s a sound that makes people stop in their tracks,” Dyck said.
A visit to city parks
A long, clear tube leads from the hive to the roof of the gallery, so bees can go outside and collect pollen. “I’m sure they went to the Bay, and the flowers at the legislative buildings were beautiful, and the University of Winnipeg,” Dyck said. “The bees probably helped (flowers downtown) a lot this year.”
Dyck said beekeepers reacted positively toward the dress. “Beekeepers know how they build. Their reaction is that this is just a different kind of hive.”
However, city people sometimes remark that the exhibit is “unnatural.” Dyck said she finds this amusing, since bee hives used in farm operations aren’t exactly natural either.
She added a sign to the exhibit after security guards told her that viewers were concerned about dead bees in the case. The sign explains that about 2,000 bees are born each day, and an equal amount die. The bees eventually drag their dead underneath the hive, where there’s a five-gallon pail that serves as a “burial ground.”
“I’m not killing them. This is their natural time. They just die.”
Dyck has been working with bees since 1991. She rents space in hives from Winnipeg beekeeper Phil Veldhuis, who also helped with the exhibit, and Henry Funk in Hadashville.
She said while a wedding relates to a relationship between two people, her exhibit explores the connection people have to insects that are a part of the ecosystem. But people tend to draw their own conclusions from the exhibit.
“From some people, male and female, I hear that a wedding is kind of like a trap, and that’s what (I’ve) done here. This dress is just stuck.”
