BIRDSPACE: A POST-AUDUBON AVIARY (Contemporary Arts Center, January 10 - March 21, 2004) is a survey of sorts. Featuring multiple works by some fifty artists, including internationally known notables such as Kiki Smith, Petah Coyne, Marc Dion and Ross Bleckner, "Birdspace" covered themes ranging from The Humanity Of All Living Things to Mortality, Loss, Remembrance and Transformation. Yet the latter most closely epitomizes the often elegiac tone of a show that was sometimes like a visual dirge. Perhaps it's the miner's canary syndrome: the more dubious the atmosphere, the more eyes turn to the canary. Something of this is conveyed in Los Angeles artist Jacki Apple's Aviary of the Lost #3 (2004), a corridor knee deep in waterfowl feathers. Traversing the tunnel-like space, the viewer hears flapping wings and the whispered names of lost species. Dank earth and crushed bonemeal crunching underfoot beneath the feathery fluff hint darkly of the cemetery, suggesting a connection between human and avian destinies.

Pam Longobardi's installation A Disappearance Of Wings (1993) uses a slide projector and wall sculptures to commemorate "the three hundred year time span it took humans to hunt and eliminate an extremely successful and populous bird species," the passenger pigeon. And in Jacqueline Bishop's Silueta (2003), a veil of dead birds hangs over a scroll of drawings of Brazilian flora and fauna in a darkly textured commentary on the fires that have incinerated much of the Amazon rainforest in recent years.

Others pursue a more personalized parallel between human and avian nature. In Kiki Smith's installation Three Crows (1995), some bronze crows lie obviously dead on the floor, literally referring to the pesticide poisoning of crows in New Jersey while ruminating more broadly on the fragility of all life. In this vein, Ross Bleckner's eerily beautiful Memorial (1994), an eight by ten foot canvas of a night sky where white doves and silver urns appear suspended in space, continues a series begun in response to the AIDS crisis. Likewise, the spooky, evocative works of Petah Coyne and Adam Fuss explore death's spiritual implications. But Jeffrey Cook offers an earthier take on a related theme in his powerful, African fetish-inspired assemblage Song Of Silence (1996). Here two wooden rifle stocks bound in tarry rope and studded with mementos are topped with the heads of birds bound with dark cloth over their eyes, in a memorial to friends who were "murdered in a brutal, drug related incident."

As befits a show with section titles such as The Humanity Of All Living Things, birds appear in many contexts. For instance, Michael Crespo's Treasure Of The Cave (1996) is a richly realistic painting of a small warbler perched on the rim of a Buddhist offering bowl, an allegory of birds as winged messengers. Elizabeth Shannon's Cohabitation (1997) features a rubber tire framing a photo of countless tires at a garbage dump. A bird's nest inside the rubber tire, and a taxidermed blackbird atp it, embody the uneasy relationship between nature and consumer culture as well as the natural world's uncanny ability to adapt to human encroachment. In the work of Karoline Schleh and Monica Zeringue, birds suggest personal evolution, our capacity to rise above our conditioning.

Les Christensen's monumental Flight From Servitude (2001), a pair of outstretched silver wings emerging from the wall, is iconic yet enigmatic. Four feet across, and fashioned from hundreds of stainless steel spoons, Flight can be interpreted in any number of ways, not the least of which is the most obvious -- the quest for freedom, the oldest and most universal inspiration attributed to birds since Icarus. Despite, or perhaps because of, the diversity of its contents, "Birdspace" is a multilayered exhibition that is ultimately as elusive and ethereal, yet hypnotic, as its subject.