Klucz Ptakόw – The Birds’ Key | Karolina Kubik and Alexis Kandra

Opening reception Thursday June 27, 6-8 PM. No RSVP needed. Live performance by Karolina Kubik June 28, 4 PM. Continues July 20. 

Carter Burden Gallery, Chelsea. Address: 548 W28th st, 5th floor, NY NY 10001.

Klucz Ptakόw is the Polish phrase for the V formation of migrating birds in flight. It literally translates to “The Birds’ Key”. For birds, it is a way to harness their collective effort to find food, safety, and to mate. Birds are citizens of the whole earth, migrating across seas, deserts, and invisible lines. For humans, the V is a flight formation for military aircraft. It is the shape of aggressive warplanes on a peaceful skyscape.

Inspired by this bird’s key, two artists with two different art practices started their creative quest. Karolina Kubik and Alexis Kandra present this show with the support of kind soulmates from Emmemm Publishing, which brought these two artists together many years ago. Linked and living on two continents, they have prepared an excursion through their natural habitats. Where will our collective movement take us?

Karolina Kubik

Karolina Kubik is a daughter of Bogumiła, sister of Katarzyna, granddaughter of Irena and Czesława, a visual performance poet and anti-fascist based in Warszawa, Poland. Kubik, as the recipient of the Fulbright Graduate Student Award, has graduated from Pratt Institute in their MFA in Performance and Performance Studies program (2018). She makes use of poetry, repetition, whispering, laughter and pro-peace activism, which supplies models for new behaviors. The manner in which she communicates her art research is not narrative – she makes progress by designing a proper environment. This is a conceptual but also physical study – art is very often not even a language, but what is occurring in its field, therefore it needs to be walked as such. „A bird doesn’t sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song.” (Joan Walsh Anglund).

Alexis Kandra

Alexis Kandra is a painter working in New York City. She graduated with a BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2013. Alexis has been inspired by animal life since childhood. Birds in particular have drawn her to investigate the natural sciences and humans’ impact on bird migration. Her art often incorporates design elements from theatrical natural history displays, and contrasts this 'natural’ world with planes of grids and geometric shapes. The grids extend behind the animals like an unseen dimension. They warp in reaction to, or perhaps influencing, the movements of the animals.