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Birds have long been prominent in Spence’s
work for their agility in traversing the natural realm and the urban
environment. In this exhibition Spence follows from her well-known
renderings of pigeons and other urban birds made of street trash by
creating object representations of various species of owls. Spence piles
and layers scrap fabrics from clothing and makes use of patterned material
from disassembled furry plush toys to approximate the distinctive features
of five species of owls that she has observed in nature and one species
that remains elusive. Commonly unseen by man in its natural habitat, the
owl is an embodiment of the Hidden Wild, and these works are installed in
the artificial habitat of the gallery to suggest the respective species’
behavior and existence in their natural environment. The meaningful act of
bringing these objects inside to stand in honor of the real creature lends
an unsettling sense of consciousness to these accumulations, reminding us
of human disassociation with the natural world.
Additional works in the exhibition
include a number of peculiar and amorphous sculptural objects made of
fabric and other found materials paired with meticulously rendered
drawings in colored pencil of the objects themselves. Spence has described
the objects she makes as dimensional drawings. These object/drawing
reiterations authenticate one another, and together in conversation with
the two-dimensional drawing the object is made "official." A large-scale
sculptural work created from cardboard boxes containing meticulously
stacked and organized accumulations of a variety of odd and humble objects
and materials including pillow tags, cell phone advertisements, thread,
bobby pins, Styrofoam, string and cotton batting is a monument to the
impulse to organize, a theme that continues throughout the exhibition. |
