Pigeon Project. December 2020 - April 2021. screen-capture recording of a video call, 2 minutes 42 seconds.
Pigeon Project is a work in two parts. The first was the release of 30 homing pigeons on what would have been the opening of the Columbia University MFA Thesis exhibition, Covid preventing. The release took place in the courtyard outside the show and was transmitted via video call to a laptop inside the gallery. The second part was the installation which consisted of the recorded call, played on a loop for the duration of the show, projected onto the wall from the laptop on a studio table. The desktop background framing the video call recorded the specific time and duration of the release while it replayed for a month long exhibition. The laptop screen was mirrored, so that the video and desktop background appear twice, on both the wall and the laptop. Itself a double, the background is a picture of a picture of my studio projected onto the studio walls.
Pigeon Project. December 2020 - April 2021. 30 Homing pigeons released from outside the Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 W 129th St, NYC, face time call, projection, laptop, table, chords, and inkjet print.
Installation view at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, NYC.
The project considers the elements of a thing’s visibility as an artwork to be a function of coefficients. There is the thing’s essential art-ness, or that which, through reification, it has come to socially accrue; its public reach; and its duration. The release of the homing pigeons was conceived as an event with a certain spectacularity and rapid decay, like the release of doves at a wedding. Once the birds have moved only few feet from the box they are released from, they are indistinguishable from any flock of pigeons in the city. They are no longer recognizable as a spectacle or as an art event. This work combines homing pigeons as a subject with a low level of “art-ness” as beings in this particular city, with the event of the Thesis Exhibition as the coefficient of public reach, and the form of a release as a time factor inducing a rapid decay in the release term’s overall art-visibility. The installation, added to the release term of this function, preserves the visibility of the highly fugitive gesture by contributing high levels of socially recognizable "art-ness" --in its form as a public MFA exhibition-- its broad reach, and its month-long duration. The installation is the term through which this artwork achieves what Arendt would say is the durability appropriate to artwork. Writing alone may have acted as an additive term allowing the release of these 30 pigeons to survive, be repeated, etc. However, this installation specifically addresses the relationship of the release to the context of the MFA show at the Lenfest Center and the culmination of my experience at Columbia.
Pigeon Project. December 2020 - April 2021. 30 Homing pigeons released from outside the Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 W 129th St, NYC, face time call, projection, laptop, table, chords, and inkjet print.
Installation view at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, NYC.
Pigeon Project. December 2020 - April 2021. 30 Homing pigeons released from outside the Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 W 129th St, NYC, face time call, projection, laptop, table, chords, and inkjet print.
Installation view at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, NYC of the inkjet print.
Pigeon Project. December 2020 - April 2021. 30 Homing pigeons released from outside the Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 W 129th St, NYC, face time call, projection, laptop, table, chords, and inkjet print.
Back up footage of the release, recorded in the event the tele-call dropped.
I devised the pigeon release about two years ago in a conversation with Baris Gokturk, focusing solely on the idea of an artwork with rapid decay. Then, I promptly forgot about it. I had planned on doing a painting show for my thesis, and then Covid struck and delayed things. I got a new studio, and got right to work making paintings. I was alone, and painting felt like the right way to be alone, the right thing to do in that moment. I lost the inclination to do anything performative. I realized that performance and formal experimentation had been my way to relate to institutions and structures. This arm of my work was primarily concerned with being with others. When thesis rolled around again, I realized it would be the perfect opportunity for the pigeon project.
In the context of the thesis show, the project started to take on allegorical meanings for me. The release of the homing pigeons (who fly home, fyi), disappearing into the surplus of pigeons in the city, from a spectacular event, all gone in an instant, became a sort of poem I had to write about my experience as a student at a big, fancy, city school culminating in a troubled thesis show, (again Covid).
So, I set about trying to get into contact with a homing pigeon flyer. In order to train the birds for races, they are released in successively farther distances from their home loft at regular intervals. A homing pigeon flyer would be doing the thing I wanted to have happen anyway, and if we could connect on a date and location, the release would be a “found practice”, a thing already in the world, with a low level of art-ness, just transmitted into the gallery. After a few tries, Mark Dion put me in contact with Duke Riley, who had done a large scale pigeon project with Creative Time several years ago. Duke put me in contact with a man named Chris, who’s brother Chester agreed to come to the gallery on the 26th of April at 1 PM to release 30 birds for $600. I didn’t ask for 30, that’s how many birds he has, but the number perfectly matched the number of presenting artists in the show. Sometimes, things just work out.
Loft. Spring 2021. oil on canvas. 48" x 60"
Street. Spring 2021. oil on linen. 48" x 72"
Burning Trash. Spring 2021. oil on linen. 16" x 20"
An in-progress shot of the installation taken in the studio, in February, 2021 used to work out the final form of the installation that would accompanying the release of the pigeons.
Flyer posted at Broadway Pigeon, in Bushwick, trying to recruit a keeper to do the toss.
Pigeon Project, interior v. II. January 2021. ink on paper. 14" x 11"
Second draft of the installation plan.
Pigeon Project, draft. January 2021. graphite and red colored pencil on paper. 18" x 24"
The first concept draft.