The End is Near

It has been quite some time since I have last posted in these pages.  Perhaps it has been a couple of months, perhaps it has been a lifetime.  The first iteration of the PODS project has come and gone.  The POD is sitting in my driveway, soon to be picked up and sent to Raleigh.  I am finishing up a set of five altars, recognizing the biblical contributions of pigeons to the mythology of the world.  I am the proud owner of a gumball machine, which will soon be dispensing healthy bird seed on the streets of Philadelphia.

My thesis has been written, by binder is complete.  There will be finishing touches right up until the last moment, I am sure, but the heavy lifting has been done.

ArtSPARK PODS

I was informed earlier today that I am one of five artists picked to do the Raleigh ArtSPARK PODS show in September (you can see my proposal in an earlier post).  My hope is to find a way to keep my PODS alive and kicking for a time and to have it shipped up to Philadelphia for my thesis show in December.  I am working with my program director to find a place on Broad Street in Center City Philly to place it.  I think it is great that the piece will have one reading in Raleigh where there are no pigeons to be found, and another in Philly where pigeons will probably perch on top of it.

Beneath You

What would you do if you stood in front of an elevator and the door opened to reveal a painting... on the floor... of creatures that you usually ignore? My current installation in Anderson Hall at the University of the Arts presents you with 19 pigeons painted on plain white panels on the floor.

There are two issues at stake, how will you approach the work, and what will your impact be? As you can see from the picture below, the impact is pretty significant when large numbers of people are involved. The first picture is from right after installation, the second from less than 24 hours later.

After the panels have become significantly dirty I, as the party responsible for placing them in this situation, attempt to clean them by hand. It is impossible to fully realize this goal, and after several cycles of degradation and reclamation, it becomes apparent that it is a hopeless enterprise, but what else can I do? These things are dirty because we are dirty, and no amount of effort on our part can reclaim what was lost. This is both a metaphor for a particular situation as well as the larger story of human interaction with the rest of the natural world.

To see a slide show from the first week of this piece, click here. There will also be a video element to the piece soon, as well as a second piece that grows out of the first, so check back for updates.

Personal Agricultural

Personal Pigeon POD 

As climate change leads to dramatically altered environment, and industrial agriculture leads to less genetic diversity among livestock; the worlds food supply may become threatened by disease or loss of suitable land.  Mankind may find it necessary to return to one of the first animals domesticated for food and companionship; the pigeon.  The personal agriculture POD contains everything the aspiring and motivated pigeon fancier may require to raise and breed their own highly productive food source.  Complete with fertilized eggs, nesting boxes, genetic material for cloning, food, detailed representations of breeds, educational information and other supplies, the POD itself serves as a fully functional pigeon coop with sufficient space for up to eighteen birds.

Pigeons are easy to raise and produce a new pair of squab that are ready to be culled every 4-6 weeks, or allowed to grow to increase your stock.  Once your pigeons have been trained to return home, you can let them out to collect food, or simply for the enjoyment of watching them fly acrobatically; individually or in groups.  Pigeons are excellent parents, and will raise your squabs efficiently and conscientiously.  Motivated fanciers will also benefit from learning how to use your pigeons as message carriers, perfect for a reliable communication network should disaster strike!

Whether you are concerned about the global climate, the economy, the safety of your food, or you just want to "get off the grid", the Personal Pigeon Pod is the answer for you! 

View of Personal Pigeon POD showing coop entrance and included education materials.

View of Personal Pigeon POD showing breed chart and characteristics and nesting boxes.

Artist Statement

Artist Statement- Matt Zigler

What happens when you learn a new word or see a new face, and from that point on you keep seeing it everywhere? It seems like it had never existed before, but you know that it was there all along and you have simply made a place for it in your mind. The same thing happened to me on the streets of Philadelphia. I knew there were pigeons around me, but they did not stick in my brain. I walked past them and they were gone. And then I saw the beige pigeon.

Why that particular bird flipped a switch in my mind I have no idea. Why does anything attract our interest and hold on for great lengths of time? Ever since that day I have watched the pigeons of Philadelphia pecking, flapping, preening and courting beneath the feet and above the heads of people on the street who are unaware of the lives being lived around them. How have we become so desensitized to the natural world? How have we come to compartmentalize the environment into organisms worth paying attention to and organisms beneath our contempt?

Through my paintings and installations I provide "beige pigeon moments" for my viewers. Art can do this in ways that science, politics, activism and other languages of the environment do not. The natural world is full of little dramas, narratives and moments of profound value. By making art about these moments, I create an opportunity to see a larger world where the connections between ourselves, other organisms, and the spaces we inhabit might just stick in our brains, so that we can see them everywhere.

I think it is important for the main characters to make an appearance in the piece finally. The completion of the piece will be based on the interaction of these five birds, how their gazes connect them, how the light plays on them, and how they hold their space. Right now, each is a little too strong, a little too much an addition, but they will become more subsumed into the piece as time goes by. After all, they exist in the space; the space doesn't exist for them.

It is difficult to focus on the monotony of the bricks, but that is what looking at landscape (even reclaimed landscape) is all about. We tend to not look at the variation from tree to tree, bush to bush. We admire architecture and can identify different building styles, but we don't have names for different growing shapes. I'm thinking about bonsai and the different "shapes" the trees have. If you had said the words "traditional cascade style" to my grandmother, she would have known exactly what you meant and all kinds of information about it. Those styles are all taken from existing forms that trees take in the landscape. We just don't know what to call it. All I can do when I am trying to teach my students is to say, "draw it by making lines sort of like this". Very inefficient. And yet there is no one brick in this piece. Each one is a recipe of various ingredients found in varying degrees in all of them.