Fly By Night Art Analysis

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Fly By Night included six different pieces of photography that documented the flight of pigeons with illuminating led light imbedded leg bands. Duke Riley and his team photographed this art in Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York from May 7th through June 19th in 2016. The art was in the University of South Florida at the Contemporary Art Museum, the art center focused primarily in pigeons. The center displayed the six medium-large pictures documented by Duke Riley around the museum and even furthered featured other art work about pigeons and had live pigeons displayed in the center with information about specific traveling pigeons over several years. The Contemporary Art Museum dedicated the art to the ever-changing, diverse and interesting history …show more content…

Riley reinforced the idea of creating an homage to pigeons due to their relationship to humans throughout history. Riley and his team trained the pigeons to follow specific directions from the blow of a whistle. The pigeons circled the sky during night fall with their leg band, and rather than carrying messages like pigeons did in the earlier years they carried lights to spread a message in a different way. The message Riley spread was to encouraged people to be reflective and grateful, but to mainly reconsider the larger impact pigeons have had on humans for a several years. Overall Riley was able to ease a message of showing an importance for nature and the way we should respect and treat our nature, concentrating on pigeons in Brooklyn, New …show more content…

Specifically, one of the photograph have the birds fling at all angels with no sense of direction while the other five photographs have more of a centralized direction that Riley wanted the pigeons to fly. Some of the directions consist of diagonals across the sky, curved line, almost a complete circle, and another sprawled in all directions on the canvas. Riley used three different symbols to portray separate messages which consisted of diagonal lines, straight lines, and circles. Diagonal lines represent action, straight lines demonstrates being still or rigid and circles convey the idea of tranquility and a period of being flexible. These three ideas are deemed important to Riley message on his attempt to share the purpose of pigeons to New York for years. Pigeons are always working which a constant action is connecting to diagonal lines. Also pigeon’s daily routine is hard to change and is very rigid when you force them to carry messages for years and to live with humans, which is the message from the straight lines. Finally, pigeon’s bring tranquility and a sense of being calm in their everyday, so instead of bashing on pigeons we should appreciate them for their help and their tranquil state. And in each photograph there is a sense of repetition which ultimately reveals the message that pigeons live a repetitive lifestyle but is still able to thrive in their life.

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