“Birdspace: A Post-Audubon Artists Aviary” explores the use of birds and bird culture in the contemporary art of the past decade.
The show at the Contemporary Arts Center includes 50 local and national artists. Six of the artists are from Louisiana, include Loyola faculty adjunct professor Jacqueline Bishop and visual arts professor Karoline Schleh.
Among the Louisiana artists are Jeffrey Cook, Roth Bleckner, and Elizabeth Shab.
“Birdspace” constitutes a diverse selection of works that encompass all mediums, from the traditional to the unconventional.
Art objects in the show are made of anything from oil on linen, like Ann Craven’s “I’m Not Sorry,” to the matchsticks, brooms and wax that compose Willie Cole’s “Malcolm’s Chickens 1.”
“Some of the work is reflective, some is poetic, some will make you cry and some will make you laugh out loud,” curator David Rubin said.
“Birdspace” is divided into four sections meant to segment the various directions artists have taken in their treatment of the subject.
“Mortality, Remembrance, Loss, and Transformation” includes artists whose more conceptual approaches use birds as metaphors to examine personal, social and existential realms.
Peter Edlund’s works in this section make social comment about the tragic hate-related lynching of James Byrd in Vidor, Texas.
Kiki Smith’s bronze crows explore mortality and loss.
The section, “The Humanity of All Living Things,” is concerned with artists philosophically aligned with Audubon.
It includes works from artists who make art about birds to stay in tune with nature in a society driven by media and technology.
It also includes art concerned with the vulnerability of birds in progressively unstable ecologies.
“Aviary of the Lost No.5 ‘The Culture of Disappearance'” by Jackie Apple uses the extinction of the carrier pigeon in the early 1900s to explore deeper themes.
The installation invites viewers to experience the artwork by walking though its tunnel filled with hundreds of mounds of bird feathers.
Works from artists who utilize the symbolic potential of birds to explore or portray identity form the section “Identity and Biography.”
The fourth section, “Satirical Gaming,” involves work from artists who use wit and perceptual encounter to critique society.
John Salvest’s “Fly” is a particularly interesting installation made of mounted sparrows, cable, and porcelain wire holders.
It has an audio element and uses imagery drawn from Hitchcock’s “Birds.”
After it’s debut at the CAC, which ends March 21, “Birdspace” will begin a national tour.
Birdspace will visit the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Calif., the J. J. McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown, Ohio and the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N. Y.
“Birdspace” was organized by the partnership Rubin, Arts Management, and Pamela Auchincloss.
“The artists who use birds as subjects and symbols seem attracted to them because they are microcosms of ourselves who seemingly have greater access than we do to the nooks and crannies of our universe,” Rubin said.
The CAC is open Tuesday-Sunday from 11a.m.-5 p.m.
Admission to “Birdspace” is $3 for students and seniors, $5 for adults. On Thursdays admission is free.
Call 528-3805 for further information.
“Birds of North America Misquote Hip-Hop and Sometimes Pause for Reflection” is ink and pencil on paper, by Amy Jean Porter. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER)
“Bird Shape I” is oil on burlap, by Monica Zeringue. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER)
Adam Fuss´s “Untitled,” is a unique gelatin-silver print photogram. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER)
