Humanwatching

2024

Humanwatching is an exhibition produced in collaboration with Anna Hogg and in cooperation with Ray Hayden and several other pigeon fanciers across Virginia. Part ethnographic study of Virginia’s million-dollar pigeon fancying and racing industry and part speculative fiction, Humanwatching follows the pigeon fanciers and their pigeons through cycles of maintenance, bonding, training, and racing. Through video, sound, object, text, and drawing, Humanwatching probes the bounds of pigeon agency and subjectivity, interspecies attachment, and the bio/necropolitics of animal breeding, sporting, and ownership today, read in particular against the long historical backdrop of the human domestication and use of pigeons.

special thanks to the following people/organizations and their pigeons — Ray Hayden, Arongio Hargrave, Trent Hurst, John Tigert, Eddie Bruce, Roxanne Raines, the Virginia Rolling Pigeon Club, the Virginia Pigeon and Dove Association — as well as Lily Bukalski, Melissa Goldman, Trevor Kemp, Anna Pillow, and Laura Link