BIRDSPACE:
A POST-AUDUBON ARTISTS AVIARY

Curated by David S. Rubin

In the 19th century, the American ornithologist John James Audubon (1785-1851) became the nation's dominant wildlife artist. Born in Santo Domingo (now Haiti), Audubon was educated in France. In 1803, he was sent to live on a family-owned estate near Philadelphia, where he hunted, studied, made drawings of birds, and conducted the first bird-banding experiment in North America, tying strings around the legs of birds. After a career in business that led to bankruptcy, he set out with only his gun, artist's materials, and an assistant, to record American wildlife of the frontier. In 1826, he debuted his bird portraits in England, and was an overnight success. His seminal work, Birds of America, is a collection of 435 life-size prints of birds, and is today widely collected.

During the 20th century, birds cropped up periodically as a subject, but never with the degree of interest shown by Audubon. Constantin Brancusi, for example, transformed the flight of the bird into a memorable abstract sculpture during the early modern era; Morris Graves, deeply influenced by the environment of the Pacific Northwest where he resided, made many drawings of birds; Joseph Cornell incorporated bird imagery into his Surrealist boxes as an evocative poetic device; Robert Rauschenberg followed a similar course when he included a stuffed bird as an element in a combine painting; and Annette Messenger was perhaps the first artist to use the bird as a symbolic signifier of mortality, and thus created poignant memorials by dressing dead birds in knitted sweaters.

Surely other examples might be cited of occasional occurrences of bird imagery within the history of modern and contemporary art. Yet if one focuses on the past decade, it is evident that there has been a significant shifting of attention towards our feathered friends on the part of contemporary artists. The exhibition BirdSpace: A Post-Audubon Artists Aviary will bring this phenomenon into closer view. The exhibition will include works from the current decade by 40-45 artists. An early analysis of the work suggests that there are five current directions that emerge.

THE HUMANITY OF ALL LIVING THINGS

Several artists find that making art about birds allows them to keep in touch with nature, particularly in our media- and technology-dominated world. Andrew Young, for example creates meditative collages inspired by the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau. Slonem and Martha Alf live with birds on a daily basis; Slonem simulates their lively animated presence in paintings executed in a pattern-and-decoration style; Alf "bird-watches" pigeons from her home, and has constructed a continuing narrative about their daily lives, using digital photography and video. Jacqueline Bishop and Walton Ford are concerned with threats to birds and the reality of disappearing species. Bishop makes paintings of empty nests and is working on an installation about our subconscious connections with birds, formed in childhood. Ford, directly inspired by Audubon, makes monumental narrative paintings about birds in peril. Ernesto Pujol, similarly concerned about the fragility of all living creatures, is working on new photographs and a related video of caged canaries. Nina Katchedorian explores the vulnerability of bird life in a conceptual installation that evolved from her discovery of abandoned eggs in a birdhouse.

MORTALITY, REMEMBRANCE, AND LOSS

Another group of artists find spiritual meaning in birds, and link them to our own mortality as well as to that of the birds. Kate Breakey's series of hand-colored photographs, Small Deaths, began after she failed at trying to rescue a dying bird. The photos are of birds she has found and carefully posed. She hand-colors the black-and-white images to give the birds a dignified memorial in a format that recalls Old Master portraits. Adam Fuss and Ross Bleckner both associate the bird with death, as reflected in Fuss's photograms depicting the shadow of birds in flight, and Bleckner's recent paintings of similar imagery, a theme he has used again and again. Birds personify spirituality in recent digital videos of Peter Campus, as well as in sculptures by Petah Coyne that have been constructed from wax-covered bird wings or real dime-store bird souvenirs.

IDENTITY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

For many artists, especially those who use conceptual approaches, birds provide useful, accessible metaphors for exploring issues of identity or autobiography. Susan Silton and D-L Alvarez employ bird references in explorations of their gay identity. Silton's computer-generated photos of birds taken from a turn-of-the-century ornithological guide that was intended for classification of birds, she questions the limitations of categorization. Alvarez's paintings mimic paint-by-number boards, but replace expected references to color with disparate phrases about sexual desire. Identity has also been an issue for Roni Horn, who grew up with an androgynous name. Her photographs of pairs of stuffed birds from a museum in Iceland challenge viewers to think about discernment of difference. Monica Zeringue's recent paintings of bird shapes constructed from other imagery, with the bird image symbolizing growth, power, and identity - all of which she associates with a bird in flight. In Tony Fitzpatrick's autobiographical narrative prints and drawings, birds represent the presence of nature enduring amidst the poverty and urban crime of the south side of Chicago.

SATIRICAL GAMING

The final group in the exhibition accepts the bird as an ever-present element of popular culture, and uses this idea as a point of departure for toying or gaming with viewer's perceptions. Amy Jean Porter's installation, composed of cartoonish drawings of birds uttering lyrics of hip-hop music, is an intentional parody of Audubon; viewers are challenged to identify names of birds as well as lyrics of songs. A similar conceptual hunting for imagery occurs in the pattern paintings of Ben Snead, where birds appropriated from field guides become purely decorative elements. The birds in Ann Craven's paintings recall those of popular calendars or boutique items, as her primary interest is in the blurred distinctions between real nature and its artificial representation in popular media. Wim Delvoye similarly employs visual contradiction in leather-bound birdhouses that draw parallels between the mating of birds and human sexual practices. John Salvest also toys humorously with viewer perception, in an installation of artificial birds on wires accompanied by fake bird sounds. If viewers don't get the point, they can read the letters formed by the placement of the birds which spell out the word "FLY".

PRESS