Kathryn Spence’s sculptures lend likeness by transforming the abject. Past exhibitions contained sculptures of pigeons, wrens, blackbirds and other ubiquitous species assembled out of old newspapers, thread, fabric scraps and pieces of trash. In her recent exhibition, she moves beyond these common urban species to focus on a more rare type of bird. Although they’re mysterious, nocturnal birds, the owls that take center stage in this exhibition are all subspecies that can be spotted in the Bay Area, and they are creatures that Spence has observed first hand.

The pair of burrowing owls standing like gatekeepers on the floor of the large gallery normally make their home on a marshy patch of land next to the Oakland airport. At dusk, the barn owl seen perched on a high corner of this gallery can sometimes be seen diving for field mice in an old municipal dump site in Berkeley. The great horned owl that sits regally on an opposite wall has been spotted roosting in an ancient oak tree just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Even though they live in our midst, we hardly ever notice them unless we are actively looking and listening. The ability to see and identify a bird comes from developing a sharpened sense of one’s environment. Owls especially often lurk in hidden spaces that may lie just beyond our normal habits of perception. Spence seems to revel in the types of observations that a heightened state of perception will yield, and the discoveries she makes through careful watching and listening enter her artwork to then undergo another type of examination.

In the case of the owl sculptures, the artist ponders how to give these creatures a spatial and physical presence, especially if most people’s experiences of them are limited to images seen in books or footage seen on the nature channel. She does so by engaging a visual vocabulary that talks around the bird instead of defining it literally. How do you take old men’s suits, torn up stuffed animal pelts and various other discards, and camouflage them as plumage and markings? How do you suggest an abbreviated form through scale and posture without having to recreate every feature? Which features are necessary for recognition, and how much of this information can you record in the split second glance the bird offers you before it flies away? The artist may have sought answers to such questions in the midst of observing these elusive creatures, and her findings have made their way into the sculptures to offer eerily convincing likenesses.

A newer body of work that Spence refers to as “object drawings” fills the other half of the exhibition. These pieces bridge the space between 3D form and 2D representation by bringing the two together. Small, indistinct objects made out of stuffed, sewn together fabric, are placed on pieces of paper that contain painstakingly detailed, colored pencil renderings of them, so that the drawings appear to complete the objects, and vice versa. The process of making a detailed rendering of an object so pulpy and indistinct as to only be describable as a “blob” may seem nonsensical, but it also distills the act of representation into a very pure practice. One cannot fall back upon any preconceived notions of what this object is, or what it should look like, but must rely upon immediate modes of perception in order to represent this unrecognizable “thing”. Bringing actual object side by side with the rendering of the form may also hint at systems of taxonomy, not unlike the process of classifying birds: you first spot a bird, and then you try to identify it by looking at a drawing in a field guide. Spence’s object drawings may be seen as a purposefully fussy exercise to similarly give the viewer a map towards recognizing something unnameable.

One of the most compelling object drawings incorporates the shapes and colors of a cluster of cut, printed fabric leaves lying on the paper. The distinction between the image of the leaves on the paper, and the fabric lying on top comes close to collapsing here, because the object itself is a mass printed image that has been copied painstakingly by hand. The piece is complex and beautiful on many different levels, not only because it elevates the common and the mass produced into something rare and unique, but also because the leaves have a feathery quality that further reference the bird sculptures in the room. Similarly, the potency of Spence’s sculptures and object drawings may have to do with their ability to hint at the recognizable and the tangible while stopping short of explication, thereby leaving ample room for a multitude of different associations.

The exhibition ran May 3 through June 10, 2006