Bird Studies

Jules Greenberg, Neeta Madahar, Paula McCartney, Annie Marie Musselman, Darryl Schmidt, and Charlotte Watts

On view: October 3 – 31, 2008

This exhibition examines beauty and complexity in the lives of birds through contemporary photographic approaches. These six artists address nest studies, bird specimen collections, accumulations, bird feeding, forest investigations and bird caretakers & rehabilitation through a wide-range of photographic styles and techniques.

Fallen, by Jules Greenberg, unveils bird specimens normally hidden from view in research collections, offering a confrontation with the dead. In Neeta Madahar‘s series, Sustenance, various species of birds came to feed at the apartment balcony of her home in Framingham, Massachusetts and became the subject of exploration. Paula McCartney‘s Bird Watching series combines varied natural settings with carefully placed craft store songbirds to create an enhanced landscape. In a second series, McCartney’s Accumulations were created at the edge of the creek where new leaves bud on branches that catch the skeletons of old ones that have drifted down stream to form a collected entity.

In Finding Trust, Annie Marie Musselman photographed birds at the Sarvey Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Arlington, Washington. Injured birds throughout the Northwest are brought to Sarvey where Musselman captures the relationship between the birds and those that love and care for them. In Northwest Nests Darryl Schmidt collected nests from forests and gardens near his Bainbridge Island home. These engineering marvels of nature are a perfect combination of instinct and ingenuity. Charlotte Watts follows bird songs and animal paths in the forest sanctuary that surround her home in Sequim, WA. She waits in the soft crepuscular light and photographs the remnants of a trail, the location of their calls, the faint sound of wings, the crackling of twigs, their unseen presence.