Note: Due to this weekend's projected heavy rains and winds, this event has been postponed as of September 21, 2023. The new date and time will be announced soon.
The Leiber Collection presents a special event, “A Bird Happening” with artist Monica Banks, on Saturday, September 23, at 4 p.m.
Guests are invited to see an expanded installation of Banks’s cakes and teacups, watch video of bird shenanigans, enjoy refreshments and listen to her conversation about this ongoing project with Leiber Collection Director and Curator Ann Stewart.
“Watching birds evokes the same ineffable feelings in me as looking at great art or listening to great music,” Banks said. “I am honored to join together with my avian friends in my current body of work, ‘Sweet: A Collaboration With Birds,’” currently on view at the Leiber Collection Garden of Friends and other locations until November. “For this project I have created porcelain cakes, plates, and teacups that hold seed and water and installed them outside on bistro tables, where birds swoop in to feed, drink, socialize and argue, creating a kind of performance piece.
“Since birds are uninhibited even when people are around, I often leave a camera to film them for hours at a time, and the videos and individual frames become part of the project. This ongoing dialogue with birds is a joyful, exuberant exploration of process and documentation.”
On September 23 at the Leiber Collection, Banks will talk about why she find it so mystifying and gratifying, to see birds dine on birdseed in cakes and sip water from teacups. She will show photos and video clips of the collaboration to illustrate her insights.
Monica Banks is a sculptor who was born in New York City, and lives and works in East Hampton. She creates lovely, sweet, conceptual porcelain sculptures of everyday domestic objects such as cakes, pies, cake plates, tea cups or pastries, that upon closer observation have another surprising layer, an underbelly of the repulsive or the grotesque, a twist that one does not fully realize until up close and personal. She contrasts the sweet and the sour, the beautiful and the ugly, the attractive and repellent, expressing tormented emotional realities.
The Leiber Collection is at 446 Old Stone Highway in Springs. For more information, visit leibercollection.org or call 631-329-3288.
Staff Writer on Sep 19, 2023