MAY 16 – JULY 18, 2018
Gage & Christensen Galleries
Augsburg University
2211 Riverside Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55454
STILL. HERE.
MONIQUE LUCHETTI & BARBARA KENDRICK

Luchetti in the Gage Gallery and Kendrick in the Christensen Gallery in an exhibition titled Still. Here. Barbara Kendrick tackles aging and Monique Luchetti takes on death, both reckoning with mortality.

Kendrick plasters her own image onto a pantheon of historic statuary plucked from the halls of museums, confronting our culture’s aversion to seeing the wrinkled truths of aging.  Luchetti resurrects anonymous dead birds she finds in ornithology collections, draws portraits of them, in the hope of redemption.

Gage Gallery Artist Monique Luchetti. 

Over the past few years Luchetti has researched ornithology collections, looking through hundreds of drawers of bird study-skins. The collections remind her of a library’s deep storage, long forgotten cemeteries, and ancient archeological sites. The kind of places humans cherish for the clues offered to us about our own species.

For Luchetti, these silent places bear witness to past lives now forgotten, like the lost voices from a first-century Greek marketplace buried under the twelfth-century Basilica of San Lorenzo in Naples. Voices that were once heard in the excavated whorehouse in Pompeii, or in the Mithras temple found 6 stories beneath the Church of St. Clemente in Rome.

Ornithology collections are as these ancient places are. Drawers filled with study-skins that were once living birds, with song, and flight – and souls. Now they are remains, cataloged, anonymous, an identity tag tied to a leg specifying their species, date of death and perhaps the name of their cataloger. The study-skins in this work embody Luchetti's personal sense of loss and of hope.

The focal point of this exhibition is a large drawing, Forget-Me-Not, Version II. The artwork is 7 feet high and 17 feet long and composed of 27 assembled sheets of paper. The drawing represents bird species that are endangered or threatened with extinction in the United States. The research for this drawing was done at the Yale University Peabody Museum. The other drawings in the exhibition are studies done from the collection at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia.

Forget-Me-Not
Solo Exhibition by Monique Luchetti
October 5 – November 10
First Friday Reception October 5, 7-9pm
Artist lecture Friday, October 5, 2pm
Monique Luchetti will be joining The Art Center on October 5 to display Forget-Me-Not, a body of work that features endangered birds of Australia and Colorado. Luchetti attended Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she received her Master’s in Painting. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is highly acclaimed as a nationally recognized artist. Her works have be shown worldwide, and she was the recipient of the Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant.
Luchetti’s thoughtful arrangements have a metaphoric quality suggestive of ritual and burial as she carefully arranges the visual components of each piece. The scenes contain birds, lifeless and illustrated in tones of gray with a splash of color provided by floral bouquets or organic patterning. These cryptic yet visually striking images of the deceased show the creatures on their backs, as if prepared for burial. There is a ceremonial quality to her dark still-life works. The hollow eyes seem to communicate the permanence of loss and the absence of soul, while flightless bodies make a bold statement stimulating a visual dialog regarding these endangered fowl friends.
Luchetti used the taxidermied birds in the ornithology collections at the Queensland Museum in Australia and the Peabody Museum at Yale University as references for the works in this exhibition. One of the main pieces in the body of work is a large-scale drawing focusing on the endangered birds of Colorado. Luchetti says that she thinks about each bird as an anonymous individual. She is hoping to bring the birds to life in her exhibition and spread awareness of the endangered species around the world.
Join Luchetti at 2pm on Friday, October 5, for a one-hour lecture where she will discuss her distinctive works and the process that have led to their creation.
 
WESTERN COLORADO CENTER FOR THE ARTS
1803 N. 7th Street 
Grand Junction, CO 81501 USA | 
970-243-7337 | info@gjartcenter.org 
 

THE BALTIMORE SUN
OCT 20, 2017
 
“Birdland and the Anthropocene” at the Peale Center
 

 
Pencil and gouache drawings of falcons and owls on Nepalese lokta paper, by Monique Luchetti, acknowledge death and life in nature. Luchetti draws birds from ornithology collections in pencil, and then layers these mournful specimens with colorful imagery to represent the former life force and soul of these creatures. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)
 
 
A thought-provoking exhibition, “Birdland and the Anthropocene,” scrutinizes birds even more seriously than devoted Ravens and Orioles fans do on game day. The art, which fills four floors of the Peale Center, ponders ornithology from numerous perspectives, but the overriding theme is extinction. For declining bird populations there is no consolation that next season will be better.
Anthropocene refers to the current geological period, in which the impact of humans on our planet is pervasive. Birds are disappearing due to loss of habitat, pesticides, invasive species, building collisions, commercial demand for wild birds, and even free-roaming cats. Baltimore artist and bird conservation advocate Lynne Parks has curated the show, which brings together over thirty artists and performers to look at the different ways we are failing birds, an essential and beautiful part of our ecosystem.
For this ornithological examination, the former Peale Museum on Holliday Street is the perfect habitat. The 1814 building has deteriorated from years of neglect, and like our birds, is a living dinosaur on life support. Now called the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture, the museum started by Rembrandt Peale is undergoing major renovations. Plans call for a range of cultural activities and innovative approaches to history education and artistic expression. The Peale, which was dedicated to art and natural history, has come full circle with this ambitious show.
Artist talks will take place at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 21, and a program of early bird recordings will be presented at noon on Sunday, October 22. Gallery hours are Thursday and Friday, 6 to 9 p.m., Saturdays, 12 to 6 p.m., and Sunday, 12 to 4 p.m. A closing costume party begins at 7 p.m. on October 28, before the final day of the show on October 29, 2017.