Jay Mosher
Jay Mosher’s Biennial piece, “Pierrot,” references that most Albertan of objects, the Earls parrot. But the installation at the Art Gallery of Alberta, which combines 23 porcelain parrots arranged on shelves, white neon and a video with a voiceover, began with earthier concerns.
“It started with an interest in the material kaolin, a soft, powder-white clay that’s used to make porcelain,” Mosher says. “Today, it’s used for its medicinal properties. You can apply it in a mud mask, or you can eat it, which is what the parrots are doing in the video.”
That video comes out of a weeklong trip Mosher took to the world’s largest macaw clay-lick in the Peruvian Amazon. (The birds consume the clay as a way of neutralizing the poisonous seeds that are also part of their diet.) “It was a nice little loop where I would reference kaolin and porcelain in the parrot, the figurine,” Mosher says. “Out of that came more ideas about exoticism, kitsch, and how far I can push those. That’s where the Earls parrot came in.”
For those who may be unaware, the Earls chain used to decorate its restaurants with papier-mâché parrots. “As a kid, that was a really impressible image,” Mosher says. The artist found an original online, scanned it and used a 3D printer to replicate it. This served as the basis of his porcelain parrots, which he made during a residency at Medalta, in Medicine Hat.
Mosher’s film of the macaws is spliced with a clip from Pierrot le Fou, by Jean-Luc Godard, a connection Mosher first made because of the wordplay involved. There are, however, other connections: Godard’s film includes a parrot, and Pierrot is a stock pantomime character who dresses all in white. “If I can introduce any kind of element of humour in a work, I’ll do it,” Mosher says.
“Pierrot” ends with a scene in the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, where Mosher filmed the animatronic parrots. It means that what starts out looking like a nature documentary morphs slowly into the realm of faux nature, a realm Mosher finds unsettling. “I think it’s really absurd how we are drawn to nature, whether it’s through the act of me going to the Amazon or just going to Disneyland to see an animatronic thing,” he says. “I wanted that relationship to slowly reveal itself over time in the film.”