Response to the festival theme "Must Art be Appealing?":
Spectacle draws attention. It is audacious. I guess in a way this serves a purpose but in terms of my own work, I am not sure if I can make a ‘spectacular’ piece even though I work large scale. I relish the quiet, thoughtful, and intuitive: presence and movement: an art that conceals the art.
I am drawn to exhibitions like Art Souterrain precisely because they take place in the realm of the everyday—in the places and spaces that people use—functioning in the world in a free space—in the space between the institution and the everyday. The everyday can disarm or lull. Using this unspectacular and unglamorous point as a launch point I want to erase the everyday to leave an illusion of glamour in an unexpected work that will interrupt viewers' visual routines to notice and reflect on the nooks and crannies of the city and beyond.
For me the glamour is that people are drawn to the work, in “the experience evoked...” or created “...in the context of the work”; all that erases the elements of transformation; the hard work, mistakes, flaws, and expense leaving only the illusion.
The chirp of a bird is usually our first sign of spring. We enjoy birds’ natural beauty but often forget that they also important to our ecosystem. Birds are pollinators, seed carriers, and eat billions of insects each year. Without birds, we would not have healthy wetlands, forests, and farms.
It is estimated that 100 million-1 billion birds die each year across North America due to collisions with windows. The design for the windows involves birds in flight in an abstract way abstract way. The focus is on color and reflections. I used dichroic vinyl that has colour-shifting and reflective properties—it is based on the scales of the blue morpho butterflies wing.