Brooklyn, NY (August 21, 2006) - The difficulty with translating visual experiences into words was well understood by Barnett Newman who said, "Aesthetics is to artists as Ornithology is to birds." Written observations of artistic practices often fall short of seeing a work of art in person. Aesthetic experiences offer alternative points of view that words cannot articulate and open up our imaginations to new ideas. The assembly of raw materials to create a work of art is an intuitive pursuit of ideas, which does not require the mental mediation needed to write or utter a concept. Bird Watching, curated by Rotunda Gallery Associate Director Patrick Grenier, will present works that offer non-verbal ways to pry open places for dialogue and debate about social and political concerns. The exhibition will feature new projects by John Beech, Suzanne Bocanegra, Peter Dudek, Sei Young Kim, Marcie MacGuffie, This Must Be The Place and Denyse Thomasos and will run from Wednesday, September 13 through October 21, 2006.

John Beech's rotating objects are colorful, glossy enamel plaster forms that sit on ball-bearing platforms. The drippy group of positive casts of the insides of common water jugs are like clunky scrolls with no beginning or end that offer seemingly endless configurations. The moment between thinking of something and recalling its name is suggested by the vibrant gathering of functionless objects.

Suzanne Bocanegra's practice includes deconstructing imagery in old master paintings and re-categorizing them into a clinical analysis. The resulting arrangement of small, exquisite brush drawings do not appear to be isolated elements from an illusionistic painting dissolved into its parts, but rather a re-presentation of a wide variety of flowers as an elaborate taxonomy.

In My Love Life So Far, Peter Dudek arranges multi-colored panels of wood, cannibalized furniture and twisted bits of wire to express the state of his amorous relations. The installation includes a chair in which viewers may sit and contemplate the assemblage of materials. Dudek's work embraces those inarticulatable circumstances where words fail to communicate deeply felt emotions.

Sei Young Kim translates organic motifs inspired by ancient Asian paintings into large schematic flower forms, such as chrysanthemums, that play off a shimmering gold wall. Viewers encounter a large wall work in which marginal imagery is rearticulated and brought from the periphery to the center.

A flock of magnetic brush strokes gradually migrates across the walls of Marcie MacGuffie's installation in Rotunda's project room. The installation is counterintuitive in that it invites viewers to actually touch the art and contribute to the four-walled painting's composition over the course of the exhibition.

A mountain of fabric rising up to the gallery's ceiling is the site for Carol Pereira's work Symbiosis. During the opening reception the towering form will be the artificial landscape for a choreographed performance in which bodies and materials mingle together to explore the tension between humans and the environment.

The collective This Must Be The Place seeks to demystify artistic practices. Their Pretty Nice Painting presents video documentation of the group being led by an instructional public-television program on how to paint a winter landscape. Displayed next the video are the five results, each reflecting an idiosyncratic handling of materials in stark contrast with the mass-media source that inspired them. Although identical in subject matter the paintings are more than attempts to replicate a legendary Bob Ross original. By displaying the making of art as event they undermine the professionalization of artists via the academy and deflate the mythology of artists working alone in their studio.

Denyse Thomasos's work suggests ways to use an abstract language to articulate ideas. Within a pictorial vocabulary she explores the historical past, particularly slavery and the traumas of a memory of historical servitude. The gesture of accumulating brush strokes could be construed as a kind of harvesting of the wall drawing.