Kevin Duggan

Roost

1 December 2007 – 2 January 2008

“Art in the Windows”

On view day and night

Mid-Manhattan Library

The Art Collection

40^th Street @ 5^th Avenue

New York, NY 10016

212-340-0871

Mon-Wed 9-9, Thu-Sat 10-6

Contact: Arezoo Moseni

The Art Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library is pleased to present Roost, a site-specific installation by the accomplished artist Kevin Duggan, in the Fifth Avenue window display cases. Roost explores the annual winter gathering of crows in Troy, New York where thousands of the birds fill the city skies and assemble along the banks of the frozen Hudson River.  The exhibition series “Art in the Windows” is curated by Arezoo Moseni.

Artist Statement

Every winter crows gather to roost, by the hundreds and even thousands, in favorite spots all across the country. Crows are intelligent, socially complex, and noisily communicative birds. Similar to most birds, they are at the periphery of our awareness, going about their lives as we go about ours. We love the exotic cheetahs and dolphins on cable TV, but the species next door are so familiar to us that they become invisible. Until they do something, such as holding a veritable crow Woodstock, that gets our attention and we wonder, “What are they doing?”

Rendered in a highly detailed style, Roost reminds us that before Nature and Nova, there was the local natural history museum with John James Audubon’s Birds of America and dramatic dioramas. Roost makes reference to these earnest, awkward attempts to capture the lives of creatures near and far. We love dioramas for their “you-are-there” trickery and the childlike suspension of disbelief they inspire.  Also they remind us of the gulf that exists between seeing and knowing, and between behavior and experience. These taxidermal moments shuttle back and forth in our minds from tableaux vivant to nature mort, but never quite register as fellow creatures in the midst of growing, mating, parenting, playing and dying. Dioramas may raise the question of “What are those animals doing?” but they do not answer what we really want to know which is “What are they thinking?”

Roost extends my exploration of a natural science art based on empathy. In Roost, as in my previous work depicting subjects from the botanical world, I am inspired by the great nature artists of the 18th and 19th centuries and their obsessive quest to catalogue and detail nature’s prodigious formal invention. Unlike those masters who idealized the perfect specimen, in my explorations of the plant world I seek out a feral botany, found literally off the beaten path. More portrait than still life, I depict vibrant, complex, graceful subjects that are akin to us but are also vulnerable, malignant, and mortal.