The Art of the Prank

…with a sense of humor

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Apocalyptic Birdhouses Touch Down in NYC, Elaine Velie, Hyperallergic.com, November 26, 2023

Artist Paul Gagner’s sculptural avian dwellings offer an absurdist take on the core structures of small-town Americana.

Near Highland Park, a few square blocks of Queens’s Ridgewood neighborhood jut southward into Bushwick, Brooklyn. The industrial area boasts clubs, recording studios, a slew of warehouses, and now, 10 carefully arranged birdhouses in artist Paul Gagner’s newly opened exhibition Calamityville. They’re displayed in a small outdoor exhibition space co-run by Lower Manhattan’s Chart Gallery and the artist-run Marvin Gardens Gallery next door.

Gagner’s tiny homes, arranged on moveable iron pipes, depict the core structures of small-town Americana. They also each depict a disaster: Flames ravage a fire department, a UFO beams up a church, an asteroid crashes into a city hall, and a sea monster wraps around a movie theater.

Gagner has long made art that ventures into the humorous and absurd, but he started making birdhouses in 2020 after he bought a home upstate with his wife. He had lived in the city for over 20 years and found himself inside a cozy new house immersed in nature at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There was no one else looking at my yard at the time, so I thought it would be funny to make art for birds,” Gagner said… Read the whole article here.