Call for Art at the Red Bird, about Birds.

Ah, POP Montreal is beginning to twitch and form into it’s mind widening self all over the city- the lamp banners are up and the calls for contributors have begun to circulate in earnest. This one gets to us a bit late, but you still have time! Get in touch asap and see if there’s room, if your heart is moved by this call for collusion between birds wings and word play.

THE SEARCH FOR THE SIMORGH.

In Farid Ud-Din Attar’s Persian Sufi epic ‘The Conference of the Birds’, written in 1177, the birds of the world gather together to seek a king. The climactic discovery of the bird’s search for their king is based on a pun in Persian: ’si’ (thirty) and ‘morgh’ (birds). Only thirty birds are left at the end of the journey and thus the si-morgh meet the Simorgh, and understand that their quest was one of self-realisation; the end of their journey leads them back to the beginning when they recognise that what they sought was already incarnated within them.

This poem stages a classic tenet of Persian Sufism: that belief and divinity are only expressible through poetic paradox; but more loosely it speaks of mankind’s allegorical affinity with birds. Often contradictory in what they have come to represent, bird’s recur in the very earliest stories as portents of both good luck and bad; of inspiration and madness, of satan and the holy spirit; of war and peace; of birth and death.

I am using this poem as a premise for a show of thirty artists and their responses to the idea of birds. I’m looking for work that is preferably not directly representational, that is founded on visual puns, that taps the rich terrain of humanity’s age-old fascination with the symbolism of birds.
Harpies, sirens, angles, dragons, and all the myriad of other winged beasts. Birds as omens of death, as mediators of the space between heaven and earth and carriers of the soul to heaven. Leda and the swan, Icarus and the sun. Our fascination with flight and feathers and our
envy of wings. The cockerel’s crow and the swan’s last song.

Siren. Harpy.
Photographed at the British Museum by Hugovk.

A murder of crows, a wake of buzzards, a gaggle of geese, a gulp of swallows, a congress of eagles, a denial of ostriches, a score of hummingbirds, a mourn of loons and a riddle of sphinxes, a fugue of fowl, an aviary of art.

This show will be part of Pop Montreal this year which is in the first week of October, therefore I need to receive a confirmation of your intention to submit by the end of July and I need to gather up all art work by mid-September at the latest. The show will be at the Redbird Studios (135 Van Horne) and all submissions can be brought there by arrangement. There will, I hope, be plenty of space to accommodate work and there are no restrictions about medium; the more diverse the better; ideas for installations, sound pieces, sculptures, paintings, drawings, videos are all welcome…

I just need thirty of you.

Form: (.doc dowload) call for the bird show at red bird
Contact: redbirdstudios @gmail.com