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 Leiber Collection Director and Curator Ann Stewart on Saturday, September 23, at 4 PM.
“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,” said Banks. “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,” Banks continued.
Banks is a Sculptor who was born in New York City, and lives and works in East Hampton. 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.
For more information, visit leibercollection.org.