Frederick Hovey, “Spooky’s Tail feathers, Collage 65″/Courtesy of the gallery
Frederick Hovey’s latest exhibition of large abstract and otherworldly giclée prints is a personal exploration of love.
“Feathering Heights” is a play on “Wuthering Heights” for its slant rhyme, but is really a deep homage to his late African Gray Parrot, Spooky, who he lived with for twenty-nine years.
His latest work of photo vignettes, which are recolored and collaged into digital 12,000-by-18,000 pixel sheet layers at 250 DPI, immerse viewers into an alliterative play on color and visual imagery.
Frederick Hovey, “Spooky’s Tail feathers, Collage 66″/Courtesy of the gallery
After Hovey’s career was halted due to his grief, he looked up one day at fifteen pictures of Spooky arrayed across the wall above his desk and knew his next art project. He did, however, focus on just the feathers.
“Boom, the easiest and best decision I’ve probably ever made,” he says.
Hovey had saved around 500 of Spooky’s molted feathers and began creating the photo vignettes that he is still working with today. Using multiple light sources and angles to shoot the feathers, he creates sixty-to-one-hundred pieces from each vignette and then multiplies them by nine discrete color changes. The most current pieces are using the patterns found on the tail-feather sheets to create the cells.
The effect is psychedelic and inviting and quite ethereal.
Hovey’s choice to change colors on copies of the finished merged pieces creates varied optical perceptions that metamorphose depending on its respective qualities. I heard one exhibit attendee describe a building in one image and another find multiple butterflies, while I primarily saw a kaleidoscope that shifted as my head turned at different angles.
Frederick Hovey, “Spooky’s Tail feathers, Collage 63″/Courtesy of the gallery
His pieces contain both warm and cool colors with a focus on the warm side of the spectrum, because Hovey simply responds more to warmth. It’s the red, yellow and orange hues that really lay the foundation of each piece in “Feathering Heights.” One could easily get lost in Hovey’s work, moving across the canvas and seeing the feathers in triplicate, multiplied into perpetuity and becoming new versions of themselves.
Hovey understands his work may seem repetitive to some, but he sees it as an impulse that keeps coming back, with no end in sight for now.
“Feathering Heights” at ARC Gallery, 1463 West Chicago, through August 11.
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