Juried Photography Exhibition
I'LL FLY AWAY: THE NATURE OF BIRDS

Ah, the birds. Uniquely beautiful, ceaselessly fascinating; borne of dinosaur DNA! Elusive and unreachable, except by the camera lens; if ever there was a creature that inspired mankind's collective "compare and despair" mentality, the bird would have to be it. Greek mythology speaks of Icarus and Daedalus, who yearned to fly free of of the earth; Edgar Allen Poe wrote of that pesky raven tap, tap, tapping at his window, and even Jesus asked us to consider the sparrow, who neither sows nor reaps, yet still gets along. Heavy.

What is it then about the bird that affects us so? Are they everything we want to be—beautiful, carefree and literally above it all? Do we envy their freedom? Do we project on to them our desire to take wing from the grave cares and pedestrian repetitions of our human-ness, to a far place both wild and beautiful, and a life lived literally "on the fly"?

Would that we, like birds, could rise to our potential without care, without responsibility! Unbound by the relic of consistency, or memory of those left behind? Oh! Fickle-feathered fastidious freeloader of heaven and earth, thy name is bird! For the rest of us, wingless, bored and earthbound, photographs of you must suffice!

Sixty works were selected from submitted photographs for the I'LL FLY AWAY: THE NATURE OF BIRDS exhibition at 1650 Gallery.