Jennifer Bain 

In my paintings, I create abstract compositional grounds with gestural, chromatically layered surfaces and geometric forms, against which I juxtapose realistic renderings of brightly colored birds. I combine abstraction with bird imagery to symbolically represent ideas such as freedom vs structure, while alluding to concepts like adaptability and transition.

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Bird imagery exists geographically and historically as part of many cultures, religions, and traditions. Widely regarded as symbols of freedom due to their ability to soar into the skies, in art birds represent a range of concepts including freedom, nobility, fertility, and bravery. Some cultures consider birds to be messengers of the gods, because they traverse the realms of air, sea and land, flying into the heavens and returning to earth—abilities few other creatures can claim. In many Native American cultures, birds are associated with the creation of the world.

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The notion of bird flight signifies breaking free of what binds us to our negative patterns; breaking from these patterns is analogous to soaring the skies. The birds in Bain’s work illustrate the metaphor of striving above our rooted ideas of self, the world, and the “other”, expressing her interest in spirituality and in transcending fixed perceptions of consciousness. The birds themselves sit in still perched postures. Away from flight, they display expressions of thought, gazing at us silently, asking us to interpret.

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