Metro Pulse/Artbeat/The Birdhouse Show

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What:
The Birdhouse Show

Where:
The Tomato Head Restaurant, Market Square

When:
Through May 5

A 33-artist salute to our feathered friends' housing

by Heather Joyner

The birdhouse as dainty: not. The birdhouse as unobtrusive within the natural element: not. The birdhouse as a place of refuge: not. The birdhouse as vehicle for artistic leaps: indeed.

For another 10 days, the Tomato Head is graced with a plethora of birdhouse-inspired artworks. Looming or listing, colorful and amusing or frightening—whatever form they assume, they are something to see. Created by local architects, designers, museum curators, professors, and others, these "birdhouses" hint at the overwhelming variety of birds they might shelter. Whereas Judy Condon's nipply "North American Polybreasted Sapsucker House" is erotic, Marcia Goldenstein's "Cat" is no cat house in any carnal sense (possessing as it does a no-exit, gaping feline mouth). Whereas Bill Barth's contained iconic egg is illuminated but nevertheless cool, Tom Riesing's egg is a spherical, earthy landscape. You get the picture.

I generally avoid describing numerous works in a show, and I certainly find it difficult to address every individual presented within a large group. However, I'm herein indulging a delicious urge to write snippets about quite a few pieces. As for artists I've overlooked, rest assured that there's not a dud in the bunch. Not one.

Speaking of this bunch of exhibitors, they seem to have an appetite for the macabre, often portraying the bird as victim. Absent are references to powerful kings of the sky like the peregrine falcon, its dives for prey as fast as 217 miles per hour. Instead, there are birdhouses with spiked entrances, and one displaying a dead bird on top and plastic hunters around its base.

Exceptions to this creepy trend can be seen in Terrain's "Bird Watchers," a show-off piece featuring a pair of birds watching a miniature video screen that actually reveals, surveillance style, momentary goings-on in the restaurant. A painted canvas with projecting birdhouses and a pipe on top, "Bird Watchers" deftly pays homage to Magritte's famed "The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images" (reading, "Ce�i n'est pas une pipe"). Eun Lee's "Dwelling," festooned with ribbon and thatched with dried flowers, resembles a Thai open-air rice barn or "sala." Like a honeymoon suite for birds, it has a sexy little bed of white feathers and eucalyptus leaves. Kenneth White displays a traditional dollhouse-scale bed behind a weathered metal "cage," and rounding out the fertility-oriented theme is Steven Wicks' "The Watcher." In Wicks' lit interior, an African goddess sporting clock parts awaits the hatching of a cradled egg. Surrounded by writhing wire forms covered in seeds, she is mistress of the birdhouse as birthing domain.

Hard-to-categorize birdhouses include Rich Gere's "Owner Financing Available," with its painterly blueprint-based backdrop and suspended partial construction. His wood-frame structure is a conceptual coup, complete with copper "pipes" and electrical wiring. Chester Holladay brings us "Eat Bird," a red house head with pop top features and a Mister Bill "Oooh, nooo" expression. Like a kite, "Eat Bird" has a whimsical tail—also made from plastic bottle caps. Susan Metros' black ski mask and red-gloved hand with a middle finger perch is just plain nasty; it's appropriately titled "In Your Face (Flip 'Em The) Bird House." Metros' urban violence thrust makes her "house" unsettling and thus in tune with the aforementioned macabre spirit.

An untitled piece by Preston Farabow has a roof studded with metal wishbones and a viciously "toothed" entrance. Travis Gray's "Other Predators" is painted a joyous yellow and stamped with an idealized '50s face alongside that of a leering cat. The words "Welcome Bird" and a heart drawn in a child's tree-house scrawl stand in stark contrast to grimly gleaming Exacto knife blades serving much the same purpose as Farabow's spikes.

A friend tells me that last night she dreamt of a three-headed Cerberus guarding death's portal...of spindly exotic pavilions...of delicate bones scattered hither and yon. I ask if she consumed a calzone before going to sleep and suggest that she get herself to the Tomato Head now rather than later. There, one can see Timothy Massey's "Bird Dog House" with its winged dog straddling a weedy perch. Tom Bevan's medieval-looking birdhouse topped with towers and a plastic lion is propped in the window. Dayna Thacker's "I'll Fly Away" has a bone-encrusted fa�ade obscuring a flourish of blue feathers. It's the stuff of dreams, be they hers, mine, or yours.