You are invited to meet Artist Monica Banks and visit an expanded installation of her cakes and teacups, watch video of bird shenanigans, enjoy refreshments, and listen to her conversation about this ongoing project with April Gornik, Artist and Bird Lover, and Ann Stewart, Leiber Collection Director, and Curator.
From Monica Banks:
"Watching birds evokes the same ineffable feelings in me as looking at great art or listening to great music. I am honored to join together with my avian friends in my current body of work, “Sweet: A Collaboration with Birds,” currently on view at the Leiber Collection Garden of Friends and other locations until November. For this project I have created porcelain cakes, plates, and teacups that hold seed and water and installed them outside on bistro tables, where birds swoop in to feed, drink, socialize, and argue, creating a kind of performance piece. Since birds are uninhibited even when people are around, I often leave a camera to film them for hours at a time, and the videos and individual frames become part of the project. This ongoing dialogue with birds is a joyful, exuberant exploration of process and documentation.
On Saturday, December 2 at 3:30pm at the Leiber Collection, I will talk about why I find it so mystifying, and gratifying, to see birds dine on birdseed in cakes and sip water from teacups. I will show photos and video clips of the collaboration to illustrate my insights."
Monica Banks is a Sculptor who was born in New York City, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. She creates lovely, sweet, conceptual porcelain sculptures of everyday domestic objects such as cakes, pies, cake plates, tea cups, or pastries, that upon closer observation have another surprising layer, an underbelly of the repulsive or the grotesque, a twist that one does not fully realize until up close and personal. She contrasts the sweet and the sour, the beautiful and the ugly, the attractive and repellant, expressing tormented emotional realities. Monica’s current works in the Leiber Sculpture Garden are beautiful, dainty, tea party scenes that entice you to come closer, but upon examination, you realize that the tea party is not intended for us, but for the tiny soaring creatures of the garden, our feathered friends, the birds. These pieces are a brilliant collaboration between Artist and Mother Nature.
For more information: http://www.leibermuseum.org
To reserve tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-bird-happening-with-artist-monica-banks-tickets-731331100007
Tickets are by donation and support future programming and educational initiatives at The Leiber Collection.
The Leiber Collection is located at 446 Old Stone Highway in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs. For more information see the website at www.leibercollection.org or call 631-329- 3288.
