Birdcage (After Pierre Emile Legrain) 2010

Flock is a sculpture made after found plans for a bird cage originally designed in 1924 by a haute couture Parisian furniture designer and bookbinder Pierre-Emile Legrain. Legrain was commissioned by the avid collector of fine art, Jacques Doucet, to construct the bird cage specifically to be placed under the Picasso painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, of which Ducet was the first purchaser – directly from Picasso’s studio.

Cibic uses the Legrain bird cage as a prototype and reworks its otherwise functionless design liaising with bird trainers and craftsmen. By reworking a display object par excellence, a cage for displaying exotic birds within the time that invented the notion of otherness within the brink of the modern gaze, Flock questions the architectural apparatus of exhibition spaces, their ideological constructs, and the operative mechanisms which define their perception. This performative sculpture, which is always modified for every space where it is shown, incorporates a live bird of prey that a bird trainer attempts to fly between two replicas of the same object.