Julia Oldham

Hive Culture: Captivated by the Honeybee
Glyndor Gallery | September 13 – December 1, 2011

Using her body as her medium, Julia Oldham attempts to transform into a honeybee by imitating the honeybee’s behavior in the hive, pollination of flowers and waggle dance—a figure-eight dance performed by bees to share information with other bees about the distance and location of pollen in relation to the sun. As part of her larger practice, Oldham studies invertebrates and spontaneously imitates their movements in front of a camera without practicing first. She improvises, allowing intuition to take over. She then edits the footage to create humanly impossible movements. Although inspired by her scientific exploration of insects and influenced by the expertise of entomologists, botanists, horticulturalists, physicists and other specialists, the work is not exactly scientific. Oldham writes, “I examine the place where science and art must part ways; and I force them back together again.”

Oldham has had solo and collaborative exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Macalester College Gallery, St. Paul, MN; Espaço3, Lisbon, Portugal; and Art in General, New York, NY. She has also been featured in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and Dia Art Foundation at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, NY. In 2010, she participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She received an MFA from University of Chicago and a BA from Saint Mary’s College of Maryland.

Rotations 1, 2 & 3, 2005
Video
1 minute each
Courtesy of the artist