“During the pandemic, I’ve been drawing and painting and thinking about the detritus of culture, the persistence of historical tropes, pictorial traditions, and creative problems posed by the weight of history. The exhibition The Spiders and the Bees is inspired by the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns that originated in late 17th century France and went on to inform European artistic and political thought.”

"The Spiders and the Bees references Jonathan Swift’s satirical take on the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns – those that valued tradition as the basis for artistic creation, and those who favoured innovation and the new. In Swift’s telling, the two warring camps were portrayed as insects. He likened the Ancients to bees, who took from various flowers to create something beautiful, and the Moderns to spiders, who spun something new literally out of nothing.

I reference this framework in order to navigate artistic forms and the notion of progress and to examine the value of the present moment and the utility of the past. How do we endeavour to create meaning and structure in the present moment and address the value of history?" - François Xavier Saint Pierre