Why We’re Flocking to Lotusland

In a small, darkened room at Lotusland, there’s a video playing that is so suspenseful it’s almost unbearable. In Bobe’s Legend, Milan-based performance artist Robert Gligorov lies on his back with his profile to the camera. When he opens his mouth, a live bird pokes its head out and looks around. Excruciating seconds go by before the baby bird leaves this unusual nest and flies away. The same action is repeated several times with different small birds, each one acting more carefully than the one before it. Multiple questions crowd the mind as one waits for each of these creatures to leap to safety — what would happen if he coughed? Or worse yet, swallowed? How did the artist manage to hold still as tiny claws and beaks poked the inside of his mouth and scratched the tender skin of his lips?

Bobe’s Legend is just one of more than 50 provocative works that guest curator Nancy Gifford has assembled for Flock, the latest in a series of contemporary art exhibitions to take place at Lotusland, the world-renowned botanical garden in Montecito. For the occasion, 35 international artists have transformed the galleries and gardens there into an extended meditation on the fate of birds and their habitats in an increasingly inhospitable world. Visitors who remember Swarm, Lotusland’s 2013 art exhibit about bees, will be delighted to find that while the same sophisticated sensibility evident in that show is at work, Flock is augmented by an even more expansive vision and includes seven delightful installations that go beyond the gallery walls and out into the gardens.

The first room to receive the Flock treatment is the salon where Lotusland ordinarily presents lectures. There one can see large photos by Sharon Beals showing nests and eggs that have been collected by various natural history museums. These elegant, formal compositions express the incredible variation in nest-building styles and materials, even among birds of the same species. These images are in turn surrounded by Nathan Huff’s dramatic owl wallpaper, and a vitrine on the far wall contains the carefully arranged remains of several meals eaten by the owls that live and hoot at Lotusland. The show continues in the courtyard between the buildings with several pieces that attempt to capture birds’ irrepressible energy. Carlos Padilla’s sound/font sculpture creates patterns on the surface of water that emanate from sound recordings of night birds. The space above visitors’ heads is filled with dozens of empty black birdcages; their doors open to reinforce the message of the piece’s title, which is “Silent Spring.”