Abby Flanagan, days, or cries of birds, 2024, pencil on paper in arist-made frame.
Earshot: Abby Flanagan
JUNE 7 - JULY 6, 2025
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 day. A metronome ticks nearby as the 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.