My Wing Things

Back in April, the artists of Spirit and Kitsch put on a group show on the theme of flight, called It's a Wing Thing. In case you still want to see it, part of the show has migrated to the Smart Monkey Cafe, just down the road, for the month of May. I took this opportunity to experiment with my visual vocabulary in the four pieces I contributed.

The first is a brightly-colored mobile that I call The Flower Bird. The new elements are the wire spiral and the toothy flower.

The second piece is a wall mobile entitled The Bird Flower. It also has a spiral and a toothy flower, as well as a black wing and a suspended river rock. The board is an old piece of weathered wood from our ceiling, extracted during a major repair to fix a leaky roof. The branch that I screwed onto this board came from a magnolia tree by the Ithaca City Courthouse. Don't worry, I didn't hack it off; it was already on the ground. Really! The branch was soaked in warm water, and the bark was peeled off to expose the smooth iridescent core. With this piece, I deliberately went over the top to see how many elements I could combine and still form a cohesive whole.

The third piece goes in the other direction. Alice Muhlback, who is the owner of Spirit and Kitsch, suggested that I incorporate the store's mascot into a piece, and here is the result: a minimalist abstraction of her signature raven.

Finally, here is a mixed media piece made of a tree branch, yarn, and wire that I whipped up at the last minute. I call it The Flying Tricycle. Most of the materials are recycled from another tree-branch-and-yarn sculpture that had outstayed its welcome. This previous sculpture was about four feet tall, two feet wide, ungainly, somewhat unstable, and just plain in the way. (Does that describe anyone you know?) I'm much happier with its new look.