Sustenance examines the complexities of human domesticity through images of birds gathering and feeding. For over a year, Madahar recorded the activity of birds as observed from her balcony in an apartment complex.
The artist says of this work: "It is around the concept of 'home' and the intangible qualities associated with dwelling that many of my ideas converge: familiarity and strangeness, belonging and migration, prolonged routine and repetition. Sustenance examines these complexities within the domestic environment. Here, various species of birds come to feed at the apartment balcony of my former home in Farmingham, Massachusetts and become the subject of exploration, with their activities documented using a large-format camera."
This exhibition also includes an early sculptural piece by Canadian artist Liz Magor from Oakville Galleries' permanent collection. Titled Birdnester, 1977, it is a wagon filled with sixty blackbirds' nests and demonstrates the need that both humans and birds have for order and purpose. Seen within the context of the former private home of Gairloch, the notions of nesting, feeding and domesticity addressed in this exhibition's imagery are certain to have a lively resonance.
Neeta Madahar graduated with an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, USA in 2003 and with a BA in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art and the University of Southampton in England in 1999. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Rencontres d'Arles Photography Festival, France, 2004, the Institute of International Visual Arts, London, 2005 and the Danforth Museum of Art, Massachusetts, 2006. Her work is in several private and public collections, including the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Madahar is a visiting photography lecturer at the University College for the Creative Arts in Farnham, England. Sustenance represents Madahar's first solo exhibition in Canada.
