New Phase of Birdsong Art Gallery

John Halpren and Emily Harris in front of their sketch rendition of the outdoor living installation in Italy using QR codes to create awareness for climate change. 

The new Birdsong Farm Gallery curator Mark Strodl chatting with ceramic artist Ann Sea at the opening reception 

By Robert Brune 

DELHI — Saturday was the start of a new approach with the Birdsong Art Gallery in Delhi.  Photographer Mark Strodl, who moved to the area several years ago, has taken up the daunting responsibility of curating the lower garden area art gallery. Strodl put together a fantastic group exhibition of four incredibly talented artists that have traveled the world and are gracious enough to share their work and experiences with the Delhi community.  Strodl says that Birdsong used to do solo exhibitions once a month, but the gallery will present a collection of artworks from various artists each show each month under his curation.  Strodl on this first show of the season, “This show highlighted by four local area artists, who also happen to live or grew up in the NYC

area. Having had these multiple cultural experiences that were all part of our artistic

makeup in how we ended up running into these hills and evolved on and enriched each other.”

The gallery is located at the bottom of the vast property near the community garden with French doors that open to the see the beautiful garden boxes of this special place coming back to life after a long winter. Strodl, “We were very lucky that the gallery survived the recent tragedy of losing one of the barns to a fire, only twenty feet from the gallery building.” 

John Halpern and Emily Harris, of the International Institute of Activism, traveled throughout Europe by way of NYC. One of their pieces include their work in Italy, “In the drawing, three artists walk in slow motion through an ancient street, in the now bustling tourist center of Capri Island, Italy. The artists are costumed in sanitary garments brandishing a QR code with a lemon insignia. They tow a wheelbarrow with a living lemon plant and a steel tube object. The tube holds compressed air fabricated in 1989, with plants.” Harris and Halpern did a very similar public choreography of their environmental awareness events in downtown Delhi last summer. Halpern, “When the public activate the QR codes on the artists’ phones they see films of proactive projects for the environment, together with catastrophic images of today’s global disasters. The codes are portals to a world shared by everyone, a world starving for care, a world of giving. The public becomes part of that virtual community through the QR codes. Just as when an artist creates a picture, a poem, a song, artists use their skills and creativity to invent themselves. They create a mythical image, as art. Advertising creates an image with an agenda, commodifying a product. It fabricates a desire or need for us to own a commodity, to buy it.”  This collaboration between Halpern and Harris has a long history. Harris contributed the elegant glass sculptures of one breath blown glass sculptures called ‘Exhales Drawn in Glass’. Both are very active with filmmaking and with their fascinating series called the Tuning Fork online and on WIOX Radio out of Roxbury. 

Anna Sea from Brooklyn has settled in Franklin and creates plain cream-colored ceramic tiles that have an ironic twist. Under the glazes she paints an eye, or a man looking back at you. They are whimsical and extremely beautiful. Sea shares with us her passion for utilizing ceramics, “I like how I can express my work on ceramics because it’s a medium that been around for millennia, one of the oldest expressions of artistry and technical acumen of messaging” In addition to Sea’s unique style of ceramic tiles, there are wavey page tiles with short poems or quotes that she calls her ‘Impossible Paper’ series which includes a quote from Marylin Monroe. 

For the first time ever, photographer Mark Zilberman is showing his work in a gallery setting. This outstanding photographer recently won first place in a contest with The Artist Gallery Awards online competition for his street photography, as Zilberman describes, “It is of a Haderi standing in front of a huge group of male celebrants dancing furiously for hours on the holiday of Sukkot in the Lubavitch community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY”. This remarkable photographer has been photographing the protests in NYC regarding the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In a recent interview with Zilberman, he shared that he understands and has great empathy for the unfolding tragedy on both sides of this war. Just in the past three months, Zilberman has been traveling the world to do photography workshops in India and Dublin, currently in London. 

Birdsong Farm Gallery is very fortunate to have such an insightful curator in Strodl who has a great mind for rich culture in the arts. This new approach is off to a sprinting success as Strodl is up to the task of bringing art that educates to Delaware County.