Annie Dunning: Air Time
June 16 to July 8, 2007
Guelph-based mixed-media and performance artist Annie Dunning negotiates ideas of space, urban wildlife, and her ecological place through the study of the world’s oldest domesticated bird: the pigeon. Pigeons are cultural followers who have adapted to an urban environment and refashioning it as their home. In the creation of the exhibition Air Time, Dunning collaborated with pigeon fancier Timothy Hume, who keeps a flock of 300 pigeons at his home on Salt Spring Island. Dunning built instruments from organic materials modelled after ancient Chinese pigeon flutes, attached her instruments to Hume’s pigeons, and recorded in sound and video the birds’ flight paths. Air Time is more than musical orchestration; it is a collaborative broadcast by Dunning and the pigeons (one pigeon called “Blue Boy” wore a digital camera programmed to capture photographic stills while in flight). Characterized as “a musical collaboration with pigeons,” Dunning’s exhibition took the form of large-scale video projection augmented by aerial photographs and the handmade flutes.
Annie Dunning earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Mount Allison University (Sackville, New Brunswick) and was, at the time of this exhibition, a candidate in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Guelph. A regular contributor to Art Metropole (Toronto), a non-profit artist-run archive and distribution agency for artists’ publications and multiples, Dunning has exhibited her work in Canada and abroad since 1999. Selected venues include Or Gallery (Vancouver), the Calgary Art Gallery, the Toronto Sculpture Garden, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax), as well as Le Deco (Tokyo, Japan). Following its showing at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Dunning takes Air Time to the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery for the biennial exhibition on view through July and August.
Images:
Air Time (photograph taken by pigeon 55)
Air Time (the flock playing the pigeon flutes)
Air Time (pigeons wearing the flutes before take-off)