Lee Deigaard, Nikita Gale, Elizabeth Gross and Norah Lovell
March 13 - April 4, 2021
artist statements
Lee Deigaard’s My Year in Birds considers the bird as witness and the woman as witness to the bird. It draws from photographing every bird she encountered and creating a database of flocks and skeins, gaggles and cauldrons from which she identified seventy-nine unique species. Because all birds are beautiful and all flight is magic to the biologically terrestrial and pandemically grounded, incidental encounters with birds heighten states of mind and the imagination. They mark flights of fancy and (often painful) yearning; the flap of wings is tender punctuation to this fragile life. Their exquisite flight formations and patterns become like sky-writing. Their footsteps leave runic marks in the river sand, a form of ground writing, if only we could read the words. The birds have their own purposes, see colors we cannot. How they swim on the wind and surf the air—many of us have dreams like this. Click HERE to view images.
Lee Deigaard is an artist from New Orleans and rural Georgia. Responding to spontaneous voluntary interactions with generous, curious animal collaborators, her work explores multi-species empathy and animal cognition and personality. She has shown and presented her work nationally and internationally and was a 2017-18 Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center. Her work has appeared in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, National Geographic's blog PROOF, Lenscratch, Oxford American, and as part of Format International in the UK and was featured in Pride of Place at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She is also a curator and writer and occasional professor.
Nikita Gale’s video White Peacock was inspired by an auspicious visitation in California at New Years. The artist had never imagined seeing a white peacock in regular daily city life, and yet there he was in the carport, exactly as Toni Morrison described him. The white peacock (or, more accurately, the white peafowl with the genetic mutation known as leucism), mysterious, otherworldly, and yet wholly specific and present comes with a message, dancing his impossible plumage among the concrete. With original audio soundtrack by the artist, an augury of sound and sense emerges in collaboration across species. Click HERE to view video.
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Gale holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Nikita’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.
For this exhibition, Elizabeth Gross shares a new series of poems that search for meaning in signs from birds and other animal behavior—from their own observations, ancient sources, and stories on the internet. Drawing from ancient Greek seers like Tiresias and Kassandra, Gross includes questions of gender and sexual violence that connect mythological sources to their own personal history. At the same time, these poems are firmly rooted in their present experience of the pandemic—isolated and searching for meaning. Click HERE to view images.
Elizabeth Gross is the author of this body/that lightning show, selected by Jericho Brown for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection of The Word Works Press (2019) and DEAR ESCAPE ARTIST, ARTIST, a chapbook in collaboration with artist Sara White (Antenna 2016). Their poem, “Ghazal at the end of the world”, was selected by Beth Ann Fennelly as the Poetry Contest Winner for the Words and Music Festival in 2020 and is forthcoming in the Peauxdunque Review. Other poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and a wide array of journals and anthologies. In 2015, they co-translated and produced an interdisciplinary adaptation of Euripides’ Bakkhai at the Marigny Opera House. They teach interdisciplinary humanities for the Honors Program at Tulane University and also co-organizes The Waves Reading Series, which showcases the voices of LGBTQ+ writers.
Norah Lovell creates a series of prints and three-dimensional paintings for this exhibition that explore bird watching through the binocular view. Birds on the internet and extinct birds sourced from John James Audubon’s Birds of America populate the split sphere compositions and uncanny narratives unfold as subjects slip permeably and cinematically between left and right lens views. Bird watchers are also portrayed and she aims to counter dominant narratives of nature conservation by centering Black Birder protagonists J.Drew Lanham, Corina Newsome and Jason Ward amongst others in the images. Bird watchers, migratory birds, and extinct birds alike are transported in the caged interiors of fancy yacht cabins, fishing boats, and ghost ships. The natural world outside is glimpsed through portals—a gorgeous, vanishing scenic backdrop. Click HERE to view images.
Norah Lovell is an artist whose lives and works in New Orleans. She received her MFA from the University of Chicago and BFA from the University of New Mexico. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice, Italy 2015), the International Scholars and Curators Program, Brooklyn, N.Y. (2015), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2014). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center; The Ogden Museum of Southern Art; The Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI; Archivio Emily Harvey, Emily Harvey Foundation, Venice, Italy and is in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art. She co-teaches an interdisciplinary humanities courses at Tulane University on the intersection of art, nature and science, and exhibits and curates through Staples Goods collective in New Orleans.