Pigeons 2017 - 2018
The pigeon represents resilience and adaptability within the constraints of an environment we’ve built for them. These birds, never identical to one another and only unified in moments of escape, embody the tension between individuality and conformity within our constructed world. They thrive within the architecture we’ve imposed upon them—on concrete, rooftops, drains—and do so with a surprising harmony.
It is worth discussing the reasoning for pigeons, namely a distraction from graduate studies and over-intellectualizing everything. I got lost in these birds as I worked through complexities of our society and art. Dramatic as that may seem, as I did my first series of these expression-filled, colorful and individualistic birds, I realized that these compositions still came back to grids.
The pigeon represents the environment forced upon a species, and evidence of their adaptability. The pigeon, whether urban or rural, knows its environment and its cohabitants like no other.
I have a lot of respect for these birds. Never looking the same way as their comrades and only in unison when having to scatter from danger. They are in tune with what we have given them: concrete, rooftops, ledges, and drains.
They embrace our architecture. They enjoy our friendship. They understand our world. They thrive.
They are part of the grids I have obsessed over, abstractly, for over 20 years. They stick out in color and manner, upon these ridges and lines we placed around them.
