THE IMAGES FROM THIS POST WERE LOST WHEN MY LAST WEBSITE'S HOSTING EXPIRED - I HOPE TO REPLACE THEM SOON
Hilary Berseth’s “Programmed Hives” use the natural building process of bees to generate sculptural forms. Berseth uses a number of strategies for organizing the way bees build: seeding the hive with a foreign geometry, compressing the available space to generate a particular form, or adding an impediment to the structure the bees would ordinarily create. Berseth’s interventions in the bee colonies act as “programs” that instigate a set of forms between the organic and the artificial. Berseth also contributes two graphite drawings to the show, “Tetrahedrons Instanced to the Stars of the Milky Way (3 stages)” and “Two Anomalous Objects”, that depict digitally-rendered models of information originating from number or data sets. The labor-intensive process of drawing gives the pieces a physical presence in tension with the abstract mathematical nature of their subject matter.