Lost.Bird.Collecting.       

Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2006

Lost.Bird.Collecting was an extensive exhibition of work created over six years that engages with ideas of collecting, intersections of natural and cultural history, colonizations and extinctions, and art and hobby art. The exhibition includes drawings and paintings on found thrift-store paintings, paintings made ‘from scratch’, video loops of local bird and animal sightings, ceramic shards, found object assemblages and a display cabinet of assorted found and made objects. A collection of dated televisions play loops of bird and animal fottage collected locally. In the far corner, diagonal to the entrance, is a large painting (84 x 64 inches) is based on a watercolour by Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 –1717). Merian was a naturalist and scientific illustrator whose remarkable life included a voyage to Surinam at the age of 52 where she illustrated the plant flor pavanis. Merian discovered, through the unheard of practice of speaking to the slaves, that these local women used the plant as an abortifacient, in an act of resistance to their colonist masters.