Birds & airplanes

acrylic paint on wall, monitor, DVD
420×360cm

A digital photograph taken through the windows of a taxi shows a sun-washed blue sky and scattered clouds. The edge of the taxi’s partially opened window can be seen, as well as a city street lamp and the fragment of another urban element. The photograph has been reproduced as a large wall painting, depicted in exact relation to the quality of the digital original. A flat screen monitor attached to the painting, plays a video of two birds kept within a cage.

The rectangular painting has been made at a tilted angle, falling across the wall as if it were a reflection of sunlight through a windowpane. The inclined position of the painting also echoes the posture of the photographer aiming out and upward through a car window, placing the spectator adroitly inside the taxi at the moment the image was captured. This view of boundless immensity, recorded from the confines of an automobile collapses back upon the video of the two birds within their small cage. One experiences a visual juxtaposition of depth, being played out entirely within the conditions of length and width: the wall on the one hand and the flat screen monitor on the other.

The monitor itself becomes a birdcage, a tiny restricting cubical within the installation that contains the two creatures and prevents them from flying away. The wall painting itself becomes an oblique peek at a vast openness made through a low window. The spectator becomes an enclosure for the wishes dwelling within every person. In each case neither the birds, nor the photographer, nor the spectator are allowed to actually penetrate the infinity spreading across the wall. All one sees is a projection or a facsimile of a true condition, a world of barriers shifted through changing perspectives where the only true glimpse of freedom is seen through the mind’s eye.