Malia Jensen 2023, photo by Rebekah Johnson
Endless Pigeons
Malia Jensen
Aug 12–Oct 21
Malia Jensen (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii) makes sculpture that is metaphor rich, wildly observant and often very funny. As art critic Polly Ullrich notes, “Wildness and domesticity, reality and myth, humor and melancholy, jeopardy and sanctuary, clarity and obscurity, impropriety and elegance, mischief and tragedy, the unnerving and the darling, the conceptual and the handmade — all intermingle slyly and at many levels in Jensen’s sculpture.”
Commissioned by Converge 45 for its 2023 citywide exhibition entitled Social Forms: Art As Global Citizenship, Jensen’s work will be installed outdoors at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts Plaza, located adjacent an urban wetland in downtown Beaverton, and on view from August 14th through November 14th.
Standing over ten feet tall, Endless Pigeons is comprised of eight oversized pigeons rising one atop the other from a cast concrete plinth inspired by the ubiquitous “Jersey Barrier.” This new work is Jensen’s long-dreamed-of full-scale realization of a bronze maquette created over a decade ago while living in New York City. Jensen’s tower of perching birds joyfully questions who (or what) adorns public plinths and serves as a timely reflection of our current national reckoning.
Besides addressing the role of monuments in our present age, Endless Pigeons suggests an inversion of power understood at the level of physical comedy. Standing over ten feet tall, the work is intended as an avian resting place and an opportunity for the birds to “patina” the sculpture in their own inimitable way. The columnar structure and repeating forms are also a send-up of Constantin Brancusi’s iconic modernist sculpture Endless Column, one of the Rumanian artist’s most recognizable works and a beloved touchstone for contemporary artists and place-makers.
In full view of this lofty heritage, Jensen’s public-facing sculpture provides an urbane and humorous correction to the supposedly sacred nature of both public monuments and modern art. The subject may appear to be the humble pigeon, common to cities worldwide, but, as suggested by the artist, “the real subject is the act of observation itself”.