In his pithy poem “Birds of Passage/Song of the Universal,” Walt Whitman writes: “Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted.” Always a magical species, the current solo exhibition "Audrey Francis: Bird Brain” at LABspace through June 25 in Hillsdale offers a lyrically lush visual encounter with birds as the focus of this painterly ballad. In this lovingly installed show, 27 gorgeous oil paintings and works on paper take us on an unexpected journey with birds in scenes both familiar and offbeat, alternating between imaginative environments that are one-part Mother Nature, one-part eccentric abstraction. Francis offers a seamless mash-up of styles including surrealist touches and occasional Pop-inspired outbreaks, all grounded in balanced compositions.
With her primary focus on feathered fellows and their avian adventures, Francis conjures exquisite realms for them to reveal their mythical tendencies and symbolic meaning. A deeper dive into the artist’s statement discloses her thoughts about birds as attendant metaphors and messengers of political and even feminist narratives. We observe the later in (Ladybird) Star Io (2023), for example, a work that is at once ethereal, futuristic, and reminiscent of the female labia in a state of lusty bloom. Another admirable aspect of Francis’ world-building with birds is her ability to incorporate aspects of fashion, pattern, and design elements without going overboard.
The artist comments that birds play various roles and double as enigmatic surrogates that embody her views on complex social issues. Pet (2023), for example, tinkers with the notion of birds as silent witnesses. Here we see the sumptuous back of a dark-skinned woman, her hair pulled up neatly into a robust bun and adorned with cheerful daises. A black bird is tucked secretly into her elegant bouffant, almost undetectable. She faces forward, looking straight into a warm green haze as an abstract explosion of black shards explodes outward and reverberates the same darkened tone of her hairstyle, hinting at Francis’s Latina roots.
Another work, Invisible (2023), portrays a bird in a small ecological, psychedelic temple with four wheels that appear to be spinning and melting simultaneously, their vibrant energy enclosing the chick within. While all the artworks in this show are sincerely spectacular, the anchor is Desirables (2023), a gem of a painting that features a ravishing menagerie of birds inhabiting a sculptural shape that dances around them in a flourishing yellow habitat. Each of the 20 birds in this work look directly at us, and their chromatically silky bodies are a wonder to behold.
This delightful exhibition is more like a series of short stories that exalt the enchanting nature of birds—is there is a sinister edge somewhere in there? Maybe I overlooked it (indeed a few darker canvases suggest playful chaos). These artworks hum with the charm of Francis’s considerate rendering of her graceful fowl, capturing their vulnerability and dignity. Her bird-filled narratives are welcoming, kind, colorful, and curious. The elegance of this show hovered with me for days, as if the melody of the orchestra of birds remained chanting in my brain.
