…with a sense of humor
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.