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About the work:
Simultaneously inhabiting the earth and the sky, birds are a poignant symbol of human perceptual limitation, dually living in our realm and observing from above. The grisaille birds I’ve drawn here with diluted India ink are all victims of window strikes and as such embody—as both a literal and a cautionary tale—the collision between the human and the natural world. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, these drawings remind us that while death is a natural part of life, human actions impact the entire web of life, ourselves included, with potentially devastating effects. The title of this exhibition is ‘False Azure,’ a reference to the first lines from Nabokov’s poem in his novel Pale Fire:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
In the poem, the writer, sitting inside and looking out, experiences his window as a permeable portal whereas the flying bird is killed by the false blue of the window’s reflected sky. I find this duality compelling—a thing can present in two strikingly different ways depending on its relationship to the viewer, and that difference can mean the difference between imagination and reality, intentional and unintentional harm, and even life and death.
Building on this idea of unintentional harm, I became fascinated by the massive solar arrays in California and Nevada—10,000 enormous mirrors reflecting solar heat to a central tower containing molten salt where the sun’s energy is converted to steam—and I was horrified to discover that as birds flew over the arrays, chasing the insects that were attracted by the intense heat, the birds became instantly vaporized, and white wispy trails of vapor (called streamers) were witnessed from the ground.
As I developed this exhibition over the past few years, I realized that the underlying theme is life and death and that the three colored pencil drawings of digitized flowers and grass are moments of life: bright, fleeting, intense. Each of these drawings was conceived as a memorial: to a friend’s mother, to May Sarton, to fellow Concord residents who died long ago and who I think about whenever I pass through on walks through my town—each a meditation to spirits simultaneously present, passing, and past.
Thank you to the following individuals who answered my call to send photos of window strikes to use as source material for my drawing project: Stewart Clements, Stacey McCarthy, David Newton, Francesco Trogu, Pino Trogu, Helen Sides, and Eliot Swift. Special thanks to Dennis Letbetter, who generously allowed me to use his beautiful photographs of sparrows in flight as the models for ‘Falling Birds.’
Simultaneously inhabiting the earth and the sky, birds are a poignant symbol of human perceptual limitation, dually living in our realm and observing from above. The grisaille birds I’ve drawn here with diluted India ink are all victims of window strikes and as such embody—as both a literal and a cautionary tale—the collision between the human and the natural world. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, these drawings remind us that while death is a natural part of life, human actions impact the entire web of life, ourselves included, with potentially devastating effects. The title of this exhibition is ‘False Azure,’ a reference to the first lines from Nabokov’s poem in his novel Pale Fire:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
In the poem, the writer, sitting inside and looking out, experiences his window as a permeable portal whereas the flying bird is killed by the false blue of the window’s reflected sky. I find this duality compelling—a thing can present in two strikingly different ways depending on its relationship to the viewer, and that difference can mean the difference between imagination and reality, intentional and unintentional harm, and even life and death.
Building on this idea of unintentional harm, I became fascinated by the massive solar arrays in California and Nevada—10,000 enormous mirrors reflecting solar heat to a central tower containing molten salt where the sun’s energy is converted to steam—and I was horrified to discover that as birds flew over the arrays, chasing the insects that were attracted by the intense heat, the birds became instantly vaporized, and white wispy trails of vapor (called streamers) were witnessed from the ground.
As I developed this exhibition over the past few years, I realized that the underlying theme is life and death and that the three colored pencil drawings of digitized flowers and grass are moments of life: bright, fleeting, intense. Each of these drawings was conceived as a memorial: to a friend’s mother, to May Sarton, to fellow Concord residents who died long ago and who I think about whenever I pass through on walks through my town—each a meditation to spirits simultaneously present, passing, and past.
Thank you to the following individuals who answered my call to send photos of window strikes to use as source material for my drawing project: Stewart Clements, Stacey McCarthy, David Newton, Francesco Trogu, Pino Trogu, Helen Sides, and Eliot Swift. Special thanks to Dennis Letbetter, who generously allowed me to use his beautiful photographs of sparrows in flight as the models for ‘Falling Birds.’
Out of the Swing of the Sea
Meg Alexander: Selected Works 1992 - 2022
Artist Statement:
A disturbance on the surface of the ocean creates waves.
Waves are particles of water which move in a circular orbit.
These are the first lines in my 1984 degree project from the Rhode Island School of Design, a book comprised of text and hand-drawn diagrams illustrating how a simple wind wave begins as a churning, chaotic mass out at sea and eventually becomes a singular wave crashing on the shore. I turned to the physics of waves to better understand why the experience of looking at ocean waves is so universally mesmerizing. Ideas about change and constancy, order and variation, movement and stillness continue to fuel my imagination and underlie my work. The ocean, with its shifting dichotomies, is my base beat, my sporadic rhythm, even as I’ve explored many other subjects over the years.
I remain drawn to subjects that embody a natural visible duration: a wave, a beaver dam decaying, a blossoming flower, a reflected sliver of sky, a tornado, flames. I’m interested in the way in which we perceive singular moments of beauty or clarity within the flux and flow of daily life. Each drawing project, whether using graphite, India ink, or color pencil, begins with a personal point of connection—a discovery, an interaction, a question. When starting a drawing I turn to photography as a tool to pull an object/event from the stream and thus capture and isolate it. While a photograph provides the initial capture, the thousands of decisions required to translate and distill the photographic image into a drawing give the resulting work a focus and singularity that transcend the original photograph to create a separate reality.
In my windowless studio, working alone, door closed, I’m able to situate myself away from the chaos of daily life. I work on a drawing project over months or years, using drafts, sketches, studies, and variations to figure out what compels me, not unlike the particle of water moving in a circular orbit, staying in place and moving forward at the same time. This focused, labor- and time-intensive process is a way for me to spend extensive time with a subject, giving the resulting drawings a distilled visual clarity and an emotional quality.
At the Ishibashi Gallery I’m presenting selected works representing thirty years in the studio. I invite the viewer to enter my world and join me somewhere ‘out of the swing of the sea’—where, as the poet Hopkins suggests in his 1864 poem ‘Heaven-Haven,’ isolation is experienced as joy rather than loneliness, not as frightening oblivion but as a sense of quiet and momentary perfection—the ultimate spiritual freedom.
Meg Alexander graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1984 and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 1991. That year, she embarked on her life as a studio artist, and she and her husband John Hirsch moved into Hallowell House at Middlesex School, joining the school community where they continue to live and work.
Meg Alexander: Selected Works 1992 - 2022
Artist Statement:
A disturbance on the surface of the ocean creates waves.
Waves are particles of water which move in a circular orbit.
These are the first lines in my 1984 degree project from the Rhode Island School of Design, a book comprised of text and hand-drawn diagrams illustrating how a simple wind wave begins as a churning, chaotic mass out at sea and eventually becomes a singular wave crashing on the shore. I turned to the physics of waves to better understand why the experience of looking at ocean waves is so universally mesmerizing. Ideas about change and constancy, order and variation, movement and stillness continue to fuel my imagination and underlie my work. The ocean, with its shifting dichotomies, is my base beat, my sporadic rhythm, even as I’ve explored many other subjects over the years.
I remain drawn to subjects that embody a natural visible duration: a wave, a beaver dam decaying, a blossoming flower, a reflected sliver of sky, a tornado, flames. I’m interested in the way in which we perceive singular moments of beauty or clarity within the flux and flow of daily life. Each drawing project, whether using graphite, India ink, or color pencil, begins with a personal point of connection—a discovery, an interaction, a question. When starting a drawing I turn to photography as a tool to pull an object/event from the stream and thus capture and isolate it. While a photograph provides the initial capture, the thousands of decisions required to translate and distill the photographic image into a drawing give the resulting work a focus and singularity that transcend the original photograph to create a separate reality.
In my windowless studio, working alone, door closed, I’m able to situate myself away from the chaos of daily life. I work on a drawing project over months or years, using drafts, sketches, studies, and variations to figure out what compels me, not unlike the particle of water moving in a circular orbit, staying in place and moving forward at the same time. This focused, labor- and time-intensive process is a way for me to spend extensive time with a subject, giving the resulting drawings a distilled visual clarity and an emotional quality.
At the Ishibashi Gallery I’m presenting selected works representing thirty years in the studio. I invite the viewer to enter my world and join me somewhere ‘out of the swing of the sea’—where, as the poet Hopkins suggests in his 1864 poem ‘Heaven-Haven,’ isolation is experienced as joy rather than loneliness, not as frightening oblivion but as a sense of quiet and momentary perfection—the ultimate spiritual freedom.
Meg Alexander graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1984 and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 1991. That year, she embarked on her life as a studio artist, and she and her husband John Hirsch moved into Hallowell House at Middlesex School, joining the school community where they continue to live and work.
