Earshot

North Loop West

Williamston, MA

Exhibition Text:

Earshot comprises new work by Massachusetts-based artist Abby Flanagan and  includes the first drawing from her new series, Cries of Birds. Using time as a visual tool, the artist marks on a sheet of paper graphed with 70,000 cells—representing the number of seconds between civil dawn and civil dusk—every birdcall heard around her home over the course of a single day. A metronome ticks nearby as Flanagan abstractly records in each cell the number and decibel of bird calls heard per single second—a simultaneously fast and slow process that requires close listening and intense focus as Flanagan considers perceptions of time and sound across species.

Cries of Birds is a more granular consideration of ideas that the artist takes up in the series, small measures, in which she combines precise marks with poetic turns of phrase. Focusing on the conjunction “or,” these drawings explore shared conditions: a blue circle is accompanied by text that reads, “Sky, or, egg of an ostrich.” Earshot also includes new works from Flanagan’s ongoing tract series, where she pours and places materials like sand, wool, and charcoal within two panes of glass, allowing gravity, the density and weight of the respective materials, and built internal wooden structures to dictate compositions resembling atmospheric landscapes. 

Included works:

Cries of Birds, 2025, pen and graphite on paper, Dimensions: 39 1⁄2 x 30 1⁄4 in. unframed

small measures, 1-15, 2019-2025, pen on paper, artist-made frame, Dimensions: 6 x 5 in. unframed

tract (the existence of), 1-5, 2025, granular materials in red oak frame (plaster, sand, charcoal, cow fur, wool, cattail fluff, sponge, wool, wood lichen, yellow wildflower, forsythia, blue flax, rock lichen, shells, saw dust, cattail a pappus, centennial valley dirt, dandelion a pappus) Dimensions: 10 x 10 in framed