mnartists.org and Rain Taxi present: Paula McCartney's "Bird Watching"
Aqua Tanager from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
Curator's Statement
"Can any visual representation of a subject in the physical world be trusted? Here is the space where McCartney steps in: she solves the problem neatly by eliminating the birds altogether, with all of their inconveniently idiosyncratic nuances and behaviors. She replaces them in their natural habitats with perfectly stationary craft-store doppelgangers—the sorts of artificial Styrofoam-and-feathers birds that have adorned Christmas wreaths and floral displays for generations—carefully placed in sylvan settings and beautifully photographed."
-- excerpted from Andy Sturdevant's essay for the spring 2010 RAIN TAXI
mnartists.org and Rain Taxi partner for a new essay series profiling Minnesota artists
mnartists.org and the nationally-distributed literary magazine Rain Taxi are launching a new series of essays profiling Minnesota artists, "mnartists.org presents," which will appear in each issue of the quarterly print magazine.
For the first installment, writer and curator Andy Sturdevant profiles photographer Paula McCartney, a McKnight-winning artist whose new monograph, bearing the same title as the related series of photographs, Bird Watching, has just been published by Princeton Architectural Press this spring.
You can pick up the Spring 2010 issue of Rain Taxi in bookstores and select newsstands around the Twin Cities metro area.
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READ Andy Sturdevant's essay on McCartney's Bird Watching series on the Rain Taxi website >>
Click "START TOUR" above to browse through a slideshow of McCartney's work and for a few brief excerpts from Andy's essay.
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About the Artist: Paula McCartney creates photographs and artists books that explore the idea of constructed landscapes, using the scientific practice of collecting, labeling, and organizing specimens as a starting point for her work. She finds inspiration in Karl Blossfeldt's Art Forms in Nature, John James Audubon's Birds of America, and James Nasmyth's constructed lunar landscapes--works by artists who collected and interpreted nature in their own peculiar ways.
McCartney earned an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and currently lives in Minneapolis. She has received both national and regional grants for her work, which has been exhibited internationally. Bird Watching is included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers Project, and is featured in a solo exhibition at the Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn until April 23, 2010. A monograph of the series is also available (Princeton Architectural Press, $50). More work can be seen at www.paulamccartney.com.
Collection
Collection Classification
access + ENGAGE, Book Arts, Landscapes, Photography, Regional
All Items
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American Goldfinches from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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Baltimore Orioles from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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Song Sparrow from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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Aqua Tanager from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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Winter Bluebirds from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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Northern Cardinal from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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Pacific Mockingbird from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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Brewer's Blackbird from the series Bird Watching, Paula McCartney
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McCartney, Paula, Paula McCartney
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Sturdevant, Andy, Andy Sturdevant
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