Penn State HUB Robeson Gallery
2021

This large-scale installation presents a fantastical vivarium, a rarefied collection of birds and plants for study and aesthetic reflection. Thousands of hand-printed serigraphs are collaged together to create a fabricated wilderness where birds have adapted to the controlled environment; nesting in unlikely places, displaying their plumage and pageantry in a truncated and finite space. Beauty is cautionary in this miniaturized depiction of an Edenic microcosm. Lotus flowers repeat throughout the composition referring equally to Lotus-Eaters and symbolism of rebirth, enlightenment, and perseverance. Greenery stretches and impossibly cantilevers creating a balance that cannot be sustained, its success will also be its undoing.

Kono Bairei’s 19th-century collection of bird paintings, vintage botanical illustrations, and large garden urns are all part of the complex dialog of images originally sourced from open-access collections and auction catalogs. Taken out of their original contexts and transformed through a series of indirect processes related to the act of reproducibility and printmaking, the representations of birds mirror dire shifts of habitat and migration in the wake of industrialization.