Wilshire Center

Artist and fourth-generation beekeeper Garnett Puett makes industrial sculptural forms covered in hive comb wax. They are unique pieces of process-oriented art. He creates crude armatures from found objects and encourages his bees to build their hives over the structures. Gimmicky as this sounds, the resulting forms (minus the bees which get shuffled off to other projects) become strange art-by-insect objects where human and natural processes of working breathe in harmony.

Most of the underlying structures are raw fragmented pieces of wood or metal. Pieces like “Screw Stem” or the trash can-lidded “Blastula” have an unsophisticated mechanical or clinical presence that seems to drown slowly within the peaceful entropy of the bee’s comb. Others, like the lyrical, bent rebar forms of “Wing,” simply delight in the translucence and geometry of the wax. By leaving the comb raw and not manipulating it into an “art” material or by seeming to intervene too much into the bee’s actions, the process is appealingly direct and honest. The work also raises tangential issues of authorship, process-as-art and artist-as-productive machine that have been well debated throughout the ‘70s. The analogy of artists as worker bees, however, seems to offer some interesting insights of its own. (Glenn-Dash Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 25.)