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New Xanadu: Honeybee Artwork

UBC Botanical Garden is Canada's oldest continuously operating university botanical garden. The original mission of the garden was research into the native flora of British Columbia.

UBC Botanical Garden is Canada's oldest continuously operating university botanical garden. The original mission of the garden was research into the native flora of British Columbia. Over the past nine decades, our mission has broadened to include research, conservation, teaching and public display of temperate plants from around the world, particularly Asian, alpine and native plants. We’re also home to the Greenheart Canopy Walkway.Come visit us - we’re located at 6804 SW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC. You can find more info at botanicalgarden.ubc.ca

A Sculptural Observatory Beehive by Vancouver-Based Artist Kevin Murphy

Now until August 18, 2012

In July and August, the Main Lawn at UBC Botanical Garden is hosting New Xanadu, an artwork installation that features an elaborate steel and plastic structure, modelled after 20th century utopian architectural styles and science fiction designs. Designed by Vancouver-based artist Kevin Murphy, this structure also functions as an observation hive, housing a colony of honeybees. Solar arrays power a heater and motion-sensored shutters, which will open to allow visitors to see the working colony inside.

As a social insect, the honeybee has long been associated with ideas of divinity, utopia, and collectivity. However, these imagined and projected ideals sit uneasily alongside bees' critical role in modern industrial agriculture, as well as their future against a growing host of diseases, parasites and other afflictions.

“New Xanadu seeks to explore our conflicted relationship with this important insect, envisioning an ideal future in the anachronistic terms of an artificial and perhaps already compromised past and present,” Murphy states.

Kevin Murphy is a Vancouver-based artist. He received a BFA from the University of British Columbia in 2009, and currently works as the Drawing, Painting & Sculpture Technician in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at UBC.

We invite you to the following New Xanadu events held at the Garden:

Opening reception:

Sunday, July 8, 2012

1-5 p.m.

Included with paid admission or membership

Possible short commute delays due to special event

Artist Talk:

Thursday, August 2, 2012

7 p.m.

Free