Artist/Maker James Prosek (b. 1975)

Avian Composition with Warblers

2018

Acrylic on panel

Unframed: 46 × 46 × 2 in. (116.8 × 116.8 × 5.1 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and Waqas Wajahat, New York

2022.14

"Avian Composition with Warblers" portrays a flurry of birds, mostly in black silhouette. The composition draws inspiration from the popular Peterson Field Guides to birds, which feature "Roadside Silhouettes" and "Flight Silhouettes" on their endpapers. These graphic endpapers number each silhouette and provide an accompanying key by which users can identify the various species represented. Prosek’s painting retains numerical references but eliminates the key. The artist explains how this adjustment encourages viewers to immerse themselves in visual observation alone: "For some years I have been making murals that attempt to question people’s dependence on language when they make observations out in the world…. I paint the birds and numbers but leave out any corresponding key, so that viewers cannot satisfy the urge to know or verify the names. The absence of a key is meant to encourage the viewer to enjoy the beauty and diversity of the forms of the birds without using words as a crutch." The predominance of silhouettes in Prosek’s composition also raises questions about the fragility of the natural world. Silhouettes can be understood as elegiac: also known as "shades" or "shadow portraits," they evoke absence as much as they do presence. Their mythological roots reach back to the story of a Corinthian woman who traces the outline of her lover just before he departs on a long journey, and historically they have been used to preserve the likenesses of individuals beyond their passing. Prosek’s bird silhouettes might thus portend loss and warn against the threat of species extinction. This connotation comes across most clearly in the juxtaposition of the flat black shapes with the eight more lifelike, fully colored, and volumetrically rendered warblers (three of them singing) set next to flower sprigs. The numbers 6, 9, 27, and 28—carved out of the vortex of avian silhouettes, and accentuated by the negative space around them—furthers the implied trajectory from proliferation toward extinction. They read as substitutes for physical forms lost from the natural world and its visual record.

DescriptionAcrylic painting of a multitude of bird silhouettes in black; eight fully-colored warblers next to sprigs of flowers; and the numbers 6, 9, 27, and 28.

ClassificationsPAINTINGS