Ecological art installation opens in Vanderbilt library café
Originally posted by Vanderbilt News
The importance of bees and Tennessee native flowers in local food production is a major theme of a new art installation at the Vanderbilt University Central Library’s Food for Thought Café.
“From A to B” is housed within the display niches of the distinctive and original card catalogue that functions as a “wall” between the serving and seating areas of the café.
Artist Myranda Bair of Las Vegas, Nev., has created 13 dioramas that depict native Tennessee flowering plants and beehives with the use of watercolor on paper cutouts, brass wire and cork.
“For the installation, I definitely wanted to connect to the history of the now obsolete card catalogue,” Bair said. “From my perspective, the catalogue represents a history of organization as well as a loss of physicality to information. Digital technology takes up less space and can be accessed anywhere with the Internet, but I miss the tactile quality of the card catalogue.”
Bair pointed out that farming has become much less tactile as well. “As a community, we tend to become disassociated with the laborious yet magical process in which food is created,” she said. “I wanted to give a visual representation of the bee’s role in regional food production.”
One of Bair’s goals was to demonstrate a correlation between the highly organized role of a bee in pollination with the organizational quality of the card catalogue.
“From A to B” is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and the Office of the Arts and Creative Engagement at Vanderbilt.
Read the full article here.
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