Bird Lady!

Hello all,
I would like to give you a glimpse of my summer through a photo retrospective. These are pictures taken by Valerie in her shared studio in Park Slope, Brooklyn. As you can see, I was quite the pigeon lady! The big piece that I am paper macheing using strips of canvas covered n wood glue was actually hanging in the gallery that Valerie shows in when I first met her in the Lower East Side. Her gallery is called the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery located on 21 Orchard street. The paper mache is giving the piece called Pollock's Flying Carpet more support so it can be hung without a worry. Wood Glue is a good base because it is archival, meaning that it will last much longer then most adhesives. I went on countless trips to True Value to buy gallons of that stuff. It was definitely a necessity. We used the same paper mache process on the pigeons that will be used in Valerie's upcoming show in the Lotus Gallery in Miami. She is transforming a huge empty, clean, crisp space into a trompe l'oeil interior which can be described as an abandoned, deteriorated Floridian building consisting of a fake view of a tropic beach, an optical illusion of a deep puddle, wood piles, tile floors made out of ripped and torn papers that Valerie paints and clips, 10 paper mache pigeons, 4 sea gulls, and 1 egret. She actually had most of the bird bodies from a prior failed project so basically my task was to resurrect our feathered friends, fixing the bodies, paper maching using wood glue and making bird feet out of wire and tin foil! It was tedious but exciting to work on the all elements, including bird feet that will come together and make such an intriguing, mysterious, and detailed space.