EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
HALSEY MCKAY is pleased to present Rose Shoulder, Colby Bird’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through laborious but simple efforts such as sanding, sawing, and staining, Bird has transformed various mundane materials into simple, elegant, associative sculptures–all functioning electric lamps.
The primary medium of this installation is light itself. Bird’s photographic practice accounts for his overdeveloped sensitivity to—and reverence for—light and its infinitely variable character, temperature, and intensity. Bird eagerly reaps the ubiquitous utility of electricity and artificial light–the lamps are a fetishistic, perhaps even idolatrous, gesture that celebrates modern-day convenience. The bulbs run continuously, and some will inevitably burn out and require replacement. Bird is interested in the maintenance that the pieces require–his work often demands a continuous measure of labor from a gallery attendant, collector, or museum preparator. The lamps are also dependent upon the labors of city workers distantly removed from the piece: the men and women who toil away at the power plants responsible for the generation and distribution of electricity.
As ardently engaged with the past as the present, the exhibition calls to mind moments in art history ranging from primitive fertility idols to Jeff Wall’s re-staging of the opening chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man–the protagonist pictured in a cramped, cluttered room with a sea of lightbulbs engulfing the ceiling. Bird’s lamps also find parallels in rudimentary Paleolithic Venus figurines, not only in appearance but also in the awe, wonder, and thanks the votives inspired in their idolaters.
Rough and sometimes crude but socially and historically engaged, Bird’s project demonstrates a disposition for both youthful insouciance and unabashed earnestness. Although Bird’s work may seem to have a casual relationship to fabrication and assemblage, it is the result of countless hours of painstaking labor, rich with allusions to art history, and represents Bird’s intense engagement with