Humanwatching

2024

info

Humanwatching is an exhibition produced in collaboration with Anna Hogg and in cooperation with Ray Hayden and several other pigeon fanciers across Virginia. Part ethnographic study of Virginia’s million-dollar pigeon fancying and racing industry and part speculative fiction, Humanwatching follows the pigeon fanciers and their pigeons through cycles of maintenance, bonding, training, and racing. Through video, sound, object, text, and drawing, Humanwatching probes the bounds of pigeon agency and subjectivity, interspecies attachment, and the bio/necropolitics of animal breeding, sporting, and ownership today, read in particular against the long historical backdrop of the human domestication and use of pigeons.

special thanks to the following people/organizations and their pigeons — Ray Hayden, Arongio Hargrave, Trent Hurst, John Tigert, Eddie Bruce, Roxanne Raines, the Virginia Rolling Pigeon Club, the Virginia Pigeon and Dove Association — as well as Lily Bukalski, Melissa Goldman, Trevor Kemp, Anna Pillow, and Laura Link

exhibition text

What is a human to a pigeon, a person to a rock dove, a Homo sapiens to a Columbia livia? Humanwatching conceives of humans in the image of pigeons and the process of futuring not as sustaining the Anthropocene but as introducing interspecies possibilities in which the columbiform is the hottest form.

list of works

Perch

2024

maple, spalted poplar, powder-coated steel, acrylic paint, birdseed, composted straw, composted pigeon droppings, soil, seeds (marigold, sunflower, morning glory, nasturtium, scarlet runner, black-eyed Susan, zinnia), hardware

front half: 8.25 x 12 x 9 ft; back half: 8 x 10 x 8 ft