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.’