Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present The Library for the Birds of New York and Other Marvels, a new exhibition by Mark Dion. Since the mid 1980s Mark Dion has created sculptures and installations that serve as critiques of institutional power structures, questioning notions of representation, display, codification, and collecting. His practice has confronted for decades issues and strategies that are central to much art being produced today. A longtime environmentalist, his work acknowledges the repercussions of man’s historical impulse to dominate nature. Dion conducts extensive research, both archeological and scientific. His appropriation of these methods of gathering, ordering, and exhibiting objects has resulted in his distinctive material vocabulary. Through this formal and symbolic language, Dion offers the viewer an opportunity to engage with cultural objects and the natural world in ways that are both familiar and transformative.

In the downstairs gallery a large-scale immersive installation, The Library for the Birds of New York presents 22 live birds cohabitating with books and ephemera about the process of bird collecting, navigation, and geography, as well as images and objects related to birds from medical, scientific, and film sources. Upstairs, a group of cabinets and sculptures containing found and artist-made cultural objects and taxidermy animals highlight Dion’s engagement with concepts of presentation and display. They include Memory Box, a shed housing hundreds of found objects, many from childhood, meant to elicit memories and associations in the viewer; Cabinet of Marine Debris, comprised of plastic debris harvested from the North Pacific Gyre off the Alaskan coastline; and Phantom Museum (Wonder Workshop), a glow-in-the-dark cabinet of objects based on illustrations of 16th and 17th century cabinets of curiosities.

Born in Massachusetts in 1961, Dion currently lives in New York City. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. Notable solo projects have been presented at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Public Art Fund, Madison Square Park, New York; Tate, London; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; among others. Forthcoming exhibitions include a retrospective of Mark Dion's work at The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2017) and a major solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018).