Invisible Tethers
The Bird House
December 14, 2024
Eden Hemming and Brad Rose’s Bird House micro-gallery takes on a big assignment for its inaugural show: it seeks to create a new, community-centric space for art outside of the narrow Arts District corridor while inviting visitors to reflect on how they experience their surrounding environment.
Across the Arkansas River on the Tulsa/Jenks border, Hemming and Rose created the Bird House as a small backyard gallery to showcase experimental artworks. In the same vein as Queen Rose Art House, Cult Love House, and the Owen Park Tiny Porch Concerts, the Bird House opens up an intimate space for visitors to be a part of equally intimate art. For their first exhibition, Hemming and Rose showcase Invisible Tethers, an immersive installation piece by Rose consisting of an eight-foot wind harp, blank cards for visitors to draw on, and a sound piece, all grounded by a fallen maple branch suspended by gold wire at the end of the house.
"Invisible Tethers" at The Bird House. Photos by Todd Woodlan.
Visiting the piece on opening day proved to be an adventure. After receiving the gallery address via email, my partner and I drove from Midtown out into the suburbs and parked in a quiet neighborhood that starkly contrasted to the busier downtown gallery spaces. The gallery itself was a sliver of bright pink peeking out from behind the corner of the Hemming-Rose house, which made it easy enough to find in this nontraditional setting. As we rounded the corner to go into the very tiny exhibition space, we were met with a line full of our friends waiting to get in. We chatted with them briefly and were quickly pulled away by other conversations happening around the gallery.
These tangential interactions on the way to the actual pieces in the show are a defining feature of the Bird House: the art is only part of the point. Hemming and Rose describe the gallery as a project meant to break down “the lines ordinarily drawn between home and public, between community and individual, between art and audience, between artist and gallery.” Though we could have walked into the exhibit shortly after we arrived, it took us nearly 45 minutes to actually enter the installation because we were so caught up in the community-creation that the Bird House facilitates, supported by name tags encouraging guests to ask each other questions, a book swap, hot cider, and bags of tea to take home.
"Invisible Tethers" at The Bird House. Photos by Todd Woodlan.
Once inside, Invisible Tethers itself instills a quiet reverence that is held together through the various tensions found in the work. Though small from the outside, the interior is intentionally organized to create a spaciousness and calmness. A suspended maple branch serves as the visual anchor for the piece, while two chairs sit in the middle of the space, enveloped by blank cards and positioned underneath a hand-built wind harp hanging from the ceiling. Immediately, I was able to feel the contrast with the bustling conversations outside. The walls damped the external noise, but slits just below the roof still let in some of the sound, allowing it to blend with processed tones of the wind harp coming from small speakers. The effect was a calming, yet unsettling sonic wave.
Visitors were encouraged to take one of the blank cards and draw whatever came to mind, then replace the card on the wall alongside other visitors’ drawings. This interactive element made me actually form a response to the piece in real-time while also requiring me to be a co-creator of the piece. As a result, the piece is never the same for any two visitors. Each person leaves their mark on the work for the next person to experience. Invisible Tethers is at once a very personal reflection inside a protected space, a contribution to community, and a chance to share one’s internal experience of art with others. It is easy to linger in the exhibition, but we did finally exit to return to the conversations happening outside.
"Invisible Tethers" at The Bird House. Photos by Todd Woodlan.
Both the strength and the difficulty of the exhibit is that it can’t be experienced in a single visit. Or maybe even in two or three visits. The piece depends on the immediate time and context to be meaningful, so it requires going back to see how it changes: how visitors, the weather, and time leave their mark on it. But art shouldn’t always be easy. And that is exactly the point of the work: to have us ask what those unseen connection points are between ourselves, our environment, and our time together.
