Quiet Skies
Quiet Skies is a collaborative multi-media installation, a meditation on the decline of songbird populations, proposing a connection with human interference in habitat and environment over time, and an urgent warning to understand the process and reverse it. The work has grown from conversations among its four participants: a biologist, two visual artists, and a composer. Nat Wheelwright’s long-term study of generations of passerines at Kent Island, NB and in the Dominican Republic reveal a fascinating and sometimes troubling history of their migration, navigation, and mortality. As we watch a world in climate transition, we are witnessing declines, invasions, habitat loss, sea level rise, and environmental paroxysms, many resulting from human agency. The great migrations, of birds, of butterflies, are out of synch: skies once full with seasonal migrants are noticeably, strangely quiet.
The visual elements in Quiet Skies combine an assemblage of digital prints and shibori-‐dyed fabric, 18 feet across and 12 feet high, with two overlapping videos. We see images of a bird nest, topographic maps of a desert landscape (that was at one time a sea bed), images that could be bones, bar graphs, and cautionary triangles that indicate danger. Video projections onto the image surface suggest environmental rhythms and sea forms, time-‐stretched and with fractured light, and contribute constant motion to the piece. A second video channel of a wheeling flock of birds dominates the space.
The sound element in Quiet Skies envelops the viewer with the call of the Savannah Sparrow, from 5 speakers placed around the room. Studying the cultural evolution of these songs—how they change over generations—Wheelwright has identified a template specific to Savannah Sparrows. There are three distinct sections: a quickening series of repeated notes as introduction and codes for the species, a complicated middle section, and a kind of trilled descent at the conclusion. The song has been digitally slowed and expanded for the human ear and divided into three parts, coordinating with specific sections of the sea-‐surface video. Three vertical divisions in the visual structure of the work echo the sound structure.
Viewers are encircled by multiple sensations—simultaneously familiar and unsettling—of birdsong, evocative forms, symbolic primary colors, of increasing and tapering light, and movement that vanishes and reappears seemingly without warning, at irregular intervals. The piece joins science with art, employing the observation and questioning common to both disciplines. It focuses attention on the vast spaces of songbird migration, the extraordinary passages of spring and fall that research shows we can no longer afford to take for granted.