Winged Transformations

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Anthony Becker. Murmer (detail), 2010. Paper, wood. Site-specific installation. Photo courtesy of the AEC.
Birds, wheeling and settling and rising again, fascinate sculptor Anthony Becker. He sees countless individuals acting as a single unit and hears the beating of hundreds of wings as a joint and murmuring chorus. For several years, using the most modest materials, Becker has constructed tributes to this vibrant presence in our world.
In Eclipse: Shadowing of the Sun, a two-person show now on view at Covington's Artisans' Enterprise Center, the most recent of Becker's series can be seen. It fills a third of the large front gallery, floor to ceiling, and was conceived especially for the space.

On the floor, Becker laid out a frame of 2x4s, encasing parallel cross ties to which his lengths of brown butchers' paper are tethered in ten rows. The strips, eight to a row, each about two feet wide and embellished with brown paper birds, slant upward all the way to the ceiling, every piece reversing the direction of its immediate neighbor so that a series of Xs is in place when the piece is viewed from the side. That's not the way to see it, though. Look at it head on, from either end, or at an angle that keeps the surface of the paper in view.

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Anthony Becker. Murmer, 2010. Paper, wood. Site-specific installation. Photo courtesy of the AEC.

Light and shadow are as much the subject here as the birds. In the day, natural light and artificial light interestingly produce individual effects. The texture of the paper is visible and the birds, brown paper cutouts loosely attached, seem in their shadows almost alive and moving. They are bigger than sparrows, I think, but not so large as crows. They are perhaps a species invented for Becker's own ends? He calls the work Murmur, explaining in a wall panel he is thinking of the "low, distinct, continuous sound" of wing beats, a sound that reminds of "a complaint near the region of the heart."
The second Becker work on view here suffers from less than optimum lighting, a pity for a piece of considerable beauty. Midnight Migration is a perfect circle of white Kinwashi paper, a translucent Japanese paper flecked with fiber, to which Becker has lightly affixed, on the far side, many, many tiny white paper birds. The piece, which I take to be about five feet in diameter, is suspended vertically from the ceiling in a niche space nicely attuned to its proportions and is backed by a light shining through a circle of purple theater gel from which a sliver is removed. The natural light from two high windows negates the artificial light; something's out of balance here.

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Anthony Becker. Midnight Migration, 2010. White Kinwashi paper, blue lighting. Photo courtesy of the AEC.

Nevertheless, Midnight Migration catches the imagination. I took it to be a flock sighted against the moon and seen from the earth, perhaps by someone wanting to sleep although envying the birds. I now understand the artist had a more complex and—I have to say—more interesting concept in mind. He intends the piece to relate to what surveillance radar sees at midnight, the birds pursuing their own ends even as we nervously hope to protect ours. When such radar first was operating bird motion could not be explained. "The military dubbed the mysterious, phantom signals they were seeing 'angels,' only later discovering these signals to be the mass migrations of birds," says Becker. In his lovely re-creation, the tiny white birds indeed might be taken for angels, if one is looking for such things.
The accompanying show at AEC is a neat juxtaposition to Becker's work. While he is interested in birds in the aggregate, in exploring their flock instincts and by inference their life force, Sheida Soleimani's photographs are usually of individual, dead birds, metaphors perhaps for the end of life for all of us. Her digital color prints, seldom titled, have great dignity. They are mounted directly to the wall, held by long, slender pins and lightly framed by thread. Sometimes the mounting pins of the birds themselves can be seen in the photographs, sometimes we can see that ribbon bows have been attached to the birds. The latter is not always a good idea, but when it works suggests attention being paid.

Sheida Soleimani. Untitled, 2010. Digital Color Print, pins, string. Photo courtesy of the AEC.

Soleimani's subject is less birds than the fact of death. Although a single bird is usually the object pictured, in one work the corpse is of a small squirrel or perhaps a chipmunk. It is cradled in the hands of a woman wearing a white dress of antique appearance, whose head we don't see. In another Soleimani shows us two little fish, bright eyed but fatally tricked by fish hooks. This isn't easy material to handle. Fortunately, Soleimani is up to the challenge.
Becker is an established artist with a body of work and many exhibitions to his credit. Soleimani, although still a student in the University of Cincinnati's Design, Architecture, Art and Planning program, has previously shown in group exhibitions but is at the beginning of her career. When artists complement each other as interestingly as do these two, the viewer is enriched.

- Jane Durrell