Gathering, Collecting, Ongoingness

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The foundation of Issay Rodriguez’s long-term research on the life of bees is at the core of “Gathering, Collecting, Ongoingness”, which features works that introduce us to the fundamentals of the artist’s interest in understanding and assessing the inter-specie relations between humans and bees. A series of photographs capturing recent encounters with the Philippine native stingless bees are at the center of this exhibition as Rodriguez aligns the activities of working as an artist to that of bees: forage (gathering), pollinate (collecting or exchanging), and continue doing so as a matter of designation by life’s natural design. These similarities propel Rodriguez to pursue and engage these studies in her practice as vessels that facilitate “ongoingness” as a relationship between the two. The exhibition draws inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which places emphasis on non-human perspectives and seeks to shift the focus of storytelling from being the dominant weapon to the carrying vessel. Thus, releasing her artistic practice from the burden of identifying a beginning and an ending. 

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In observing the life of bees, Rodriguez sees a correlation with the way humans move and participate in ecosystems: rhythms in building a beehive and the production of food. Following Aristotle’s views, everything reveals the connectedness of things and the order of nature; hence, nothing is random. The photographs in the exhibition are portraits of stingless bee colonies in different colony health statuses, each intuitively intelligible through sound and visual cues like color, form and texture. While inspecting the hives and assessing bee population, brood patterns, comb condition, pollen and nectar stores, Rodriguez engages in complete sensory experience, insightfully pondering on the inseparable link between bees and their environment. These observations prompt the artist to think about her position and participation in different ecosystems, specifically in the art ecosystem. Reflecting on the links between the designated role of bees as producers of honey, Rodriguez likens this to the role of an artist: nothing becomes transactional in producing the unquantifiable.

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Bees and humans appear to carry immeasurable currencies: honey and labor. Anchored in this argument, Rodriguez makes a case for her object-based practice as a continuation of foraging and pollinating with the excesses of her research, studio activities, and collaborations. She compares it with subsistence agriculture as one can keep art to themselves. Still, when one decides to pollinate others, they approach it through the distribution of quantifiable outputs that are often only representations of the artistic practice but not its entirety.