Jan MUN received a Puffin West grant in 2012. We are always so happy that our Puffin Friends remember us over the years, as this is what makes us a Family. The Puffin Family is one that has not given up and believes that activists’ art utilizing creative imagination can speak to all people and reach across barriers or borders and encourage people to change their ideas and work for a peaceful word for all people and creatures.
If you recall Jan’s original colony located in Battery Park in Manhattan which was brought up to Saint John’s the Divine for the Feast of Saint Francis and Blessing of the Animals in October, 2012 as lost to Hurricane Sandy. She has a new colony of BEES and she took her new colony to St. John’s for the Blessing of the Animals on October 3rd, 2015. We smiled to broadly waking up this morning to see her kind remembrance to PFW and we share with you the most amazing pictures of the colony at the Alter.
Jan Mun has an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and has been working with living organic matter to explore the generative principles of how complex systems such as botany, economics, and social networks function and the effects of interactions between different entities, whether cultures, plants or people. Jan is a member of the NYC Beekeeping Group. She created BeeSpace, an audio interactive observation beehive. BeeSpace shows the bees’ natural system in an artificially built environment, which allows the viewer to have a visceral and intimate experience with the natural world. Humans are threatened by BEES, and bees certainly have been threatened by HUMANS due to environmental pollution, pesticides, disease and modern farming techniques.
PFW’s Grant to BeeSpace may be out of ordinary realm of awards given out, but believe that technology and science have a growing place in social discourse, and that we cannot be blind to the fact that emerging technologies will and have effected social justice and that scientists are using their tools to make scientific art as it does communicate. We believe that culture and its roots as a scientific study has had great effects on the arts and expression. As a viewer of BeeSpace, Jan Mun invites you up to the glass that separates you from the bees and then she asks you put on headphones and an ultrasonic sensor is triggered to increase the audio from inside the live hive. The sound increases until you no longer feel the bees are isolated and “OH DEAR” you fear that they may have escaped into the room. The question is are either the bees or us safe within artificially built environments? Jan uses this as a social reflection and critique of our political and social systems. www.janmun.com
