Rosalyn Bodycomb - My Aviary

Rosalyn Bodycomb

“What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.” Charles Baudelaire How do you free a painting from the confines of its canvas? After 30 years of painting, I still find this one of the form’s greatest and most exciting challenges. In My Aviary, I aimed to set painting in motion. This 30-foot-long multimedia installation project is made up of mobiles, sound, and 51 mixed media panels. Birds flutter and circle within a brightly lit room - free to fly, yet somehow confined. The piece is not sight-specific, but is designed to fill any number of spaces with painting, movement, and music. My hope is that the viewer feels immersed in an experience at once familiar and strange, where the beauty of the tactile, tangible world meets the beauty of the dream-state. Rosalyn Bodycomb was born in Hawaii, raised in California, and lived in Texas for 25 years before moving to New York in 2003. She is a 2005 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award, a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a 2009 Pollock-Krasner Grant. She lives in Long Island City and works in a studio at the Chashama Foundation, Brooklyn Army Terminal Building B.