The University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach opens new space with three exhibitions, featuring Jessica Rath: A Better Nectar

The University Art Museum and CSULB community celebrate the grand opening of a new plaza entrance and permanent collection gallery with three exhibitions, featuring Jessica Rath: A Better Nectar, an expansive multisensory installation based on the tender co-evolutionary communication between flowering plants and their pollinators. Opening in the Wesley G. Hampton Gallery is Consumed, a group exhibition organized by CSULB School of Art Museum and Curatorial Studies graduate students, in which the implications of mass consumption are explored. In MOCA 8, the UAM's first edition prints of the famed portfolio "Eight by Eight to Celebrate The Temporary Contemporary" will be on view in the new, 2900 sq. foot Permanent Collection Gallery.

In A Better Nectar, Jessica Rath creates an immersive rhythmic experience, using sculpture, light, and sound to consider how bumblebees learn and remember multisensory floral signals to find better nectar. Visitors are provided with a human-scaled experience of a bee's intimate sensorial journey from its underground nest to an audibly and visually pulsating world, based on the Rath's research and discussions with the scientists at Leonard Bee Lab at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The exhibition's highlight, "Resonant Nest," is a responsive acoustic sculpture taking the form of a human-scaled bumblebee nest. Human voice interpretations of bee communication emanate from the sculpture, designed in collaboration with Ian Schneller of Specimen Products, Chicago. The score, created by Los Angeles-based composer Robert Hoehn and performed by the nationally renowned CSULB Bob Cole Conservatory of Music Chamber Choir, directed by Dr. Jonathan Talberg, shifts with live changes in weather, season, and time, as well as to the viewer's presence in the gallery.

"Bee Purple" is an immersive light work based on bee vision, created in collaboration with Aeolab multimedia designer Elise Co. Bee perception of color is shifted to the ultraviolet spectrum and omits red completely. This installation follows the bee's visual passage from nest to flower, with intermittent flashes of rhythmic floral patterns in purples, yellows, and aqua-greens that signal nectar.

In "Staminal Evolution," the odd and visually intriguing forms of both cultivated tomato and native Manzanita flower stamens have been enlarged to human scale. These sonic sculptures emit the frequencies of "buzz pollination," a phenomenon created through coadaptation between certain flowers and their pollinators. As bee expert Dr. Anne Leonard describes, "During buzz pollination (also known as sonication), bees rapidly contract their indirect flight muscles, producing strong vibrations that forcibly expel pollen out from inside the flower's anthers." In essence, the bees "turn themselves into living tuning forks," according to entomologist Dr. Stephen Buchmann. Leading up to the January exhibition, Rath's progress can be followed on her "Bee Blog" at jessicarath.com.

A Better Nectar also includes a "Research Station," featuring Rath's photo essay of the Leonard Bee Lab; the acoustically designed 200-pound plug mold used to produce "Resonant Nest"; and live feeds of native flower specimens, using microscopes provided by the CSULB Department of Biological Sciences. On-site plantings for the "Research Station" and related LBUSD elementary school outreach are developed by the UAM in partnership with the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants, which is dedicated to the promotion, preservation and restoration of California landscapes and habitats.