Adrian Göllner at the Central Art Garage

Adrian Göllner’s latest body of work, All the Birds I Saw Last Year, had its debut in an exhibition at the Central Art Garage, running from September 20 to December 22, 2018. The installation tracks the number of birds the artist observed and recorded on his cellphone in the course of his day-to-day life in Ottawa (with added excursions to Cuba, Nashville and Victoria) from September 2017 to September 2018. The result is an exercise in conceptual ornithology that draws critical attention to environments both inside and outside the gallery.

Adrian Göllner, January (detail), 2018. Ink-jet print, 81.2 x 83.8 cm. Photo: Julia Martin.

In keeping with the concerns and systematic rigor of Göllner's previous work, All the Birds I Saw Last Year also has political and environmental connotations—Göllner’s yearlong count added up to a little more than 14,000 birds, suggesting a precipitous decline since Audubon’s time—but the inclusion of naturalistic representations of birds anchors the conceptual abstraction of its raw data and lends the work a broad appeal. Click here to read the complete text of my review of the exhibition which was published on December 13 by Canadian Art online.