Adrian Göllner -All the Birds I Saw Last Year
Sept 20th to November 4th, 2018
Artist Statement on the exhibition:
All the Birds I Saw Last Year is a graphical listing of the 14,136 bird sightings I made between September 18th, 2017 and September 17th, 2018.
All the Birds I Saw Last Year is my attempt to portend something of our future through the dedicated observance of local bird populations. By charting every bird I see – no matter how incidental – some rhythms or patterns might emerge that are telling of the health of our shared environment. As we wade into the Anthropocene Epoch however, the act of observing nature and nature itself has been inexorably altered by human activity and I fear what the birds might tell me.
Still, there is beauty in the pursuit. Making visual the ambient presence of the birds within our midst is pleasantly overwhelming. Each of the thousands of bird illustrations is a stand-in for being so particularly evolved and so innately beautiful as to boggle the mind. The unspoken instruction of the exhibition is to be a better observer of one’s surroundings and, by extension, a better steward of nature.
