This weekend, Tivoli gets a closing look at "The Birdhouses," a solo presentation of Ladd’s expressive assemblages, on view Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5pm at Available Items, at 64 Broadway.
April 25, 26 | 64 Broadway, Tivoli, NY | 12:00pm–5:00pm
A bicycle seat. A vintage pencil sharpener. A scrap of weathered wood that might otherwise have ended up in a burn pile. In the hands of sculptor Dan Ladd, these cast-off objects become dwellings for birds.
This weekend, Tivoli gets a closing look at "The Birdhouses," a solo presentation of Ladd’s expressive assemblages, on view Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5pm at Available Items, at 64 Broadway.
The show arrives at an interesting cultural moment. The humble birdhouse has become one of the art and design world’s favorite small canvases. Major exhibitions have recently cropped up at MAD Brussels, Christie’s in London, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, with architects like Sou Fujimoto and Frida Escobedo trying their hand at the form.
Ladd’s Tivoli show sits squarely inside that conversation, but it also stands apart. Where many designers approach the birdhouse as a miniaturized building, Ladd approaches it as a collaboration between the maker, the materials already at hand, and the wild creatures who might eventually move in.That sensibility is consistent with a practice Ladd has been developing for nearly four decades.
Ladd is perhaps best known for his work in arbor-sculpture and “botanical architecture”—the art of guiding the growth of living trees and gourds into sculptural forms using grafts and molds, a process he has described as a give-and-take with nature. His grown works have appeared at the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Massachusetts and in public landscapes across the country.
The Birdhouses translates that same patient attention to the non-human world into a more portable, more collectible form. Each piece is an assemblage; each tells a small story about reuse, habitat, and the strange poetry of found things.
