Exhibit: September 28, 2015 - November 7, 2015
- Reception: Thursday, October 1, 5-7 p.m.; Gallery Talk at 6:30 p.m. by Kendrick and Luchetti
- Music by Parkland Guitar Ensemble
- Additional Gallery Lectures:
Wednesday, September 30 at 1:15 p.m. in the gallery Thursday, October 1 at 1:15 p.m. in the gallery
- Additional Programming:
Parkland College Sustanability Program activities, Nature visit from the Anita Purvis Nature Center
Giertz Gallery at Parkland College presents a two-person art exhibition exploring ideas about humans’ daily interaction with wildlife and our impact on nature.
“Ornithology: Works by Barbara Kendrick and Monique Luchetti” opens Monday, September 28 and runs through Saturday, November 7, 2015. In conjunction with the exhibit, a reception honoring the artists is scheduled for Thursday, October 1 from 5 zto 7 p.m., featuring a gallery talk by Kendrick and Luchetti at 6:30 p.m..
Kendrick and Luchetti have a fascination and sympathy with birds, but their work is divergent in concepts, material, and process. Although the artists take different approaches in their body of work, they both use images of birds to speak to the ways our lives are inextricably tied together, interdependent and bound to the earth for survival.
“We are alive in a world where the distinction between what we know to be human and what we believe to be animal is shrinking,” the artists said about their exhibit. Kendrick, a retired professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, admires birds’ ability to survive and adapt to new, sometimes hostile environments. The way they build nests in the alphabet of signs on storefronts, or gather cigarette butts to line their nests, informs her collages. As she makes her work, she tries to match her own sense of improvisation with that of the birds. Each collage opens up new questions about our connection to the way the birds live in our world.
Luchetti, a Brooklyn-based studio artist, sifts through museums’ ornithology collections as if they were cemeteries, gleaning the identities of the birds for her drawings, preserved and tagged by humans for further study. Her drawings are a meditation of loss and remembering and on the contradiction inherent in humans: racing to collect, classify, and catalog species while continuing to haplessly destroy the same species through climate change and the devastation of the planet’s forests and oceans.
In addition to the artist lectures, and in tandem with Parkland College’s Sustainable Campus Committee, Giertz Gallery will host a program titled “Owls and Avian Adaptations” on Tuesday, October 20 from 1:15 to 2:15 p.m. in the gallery lounge. Savannah Donovan from the Urbana Park District’s Anita Purves Nature Center will introduce audiences to Quasi, the Eastern screech owl. Donovan will reveal the amazing adaptations that allow owls to thrive in darkness. Other avian specimens will be on hand for comparison.
Image: Barbara Kendrick, St. Franny, 19" x 16", collage, 2015