‘Homing’ was initially conceived as a performance and research project to explore ways of making home in the artist’s city of Toronto. Recent OCAD graduate Maddy Young built a mini corner store — but for pigeons — that attaches to a bike trailer, and spent a month biking across the city, filming and documenting the birds that she interacted with.
Our city is always simultaneously an engineered, modernist machine and a wild ecosystem. Pigeons straddle that line as a symbol of both modernity and modernity’s decay. By acquainting herself with her local birds, Maddy tries to find a way to live and make “home,” in a way that embraces the inherent wildness of the city.
This iteration of ‘Homing’ will find itself in the base of a condo tower, where an excess of model birds will gather in the lobby. Viewers are encouraged to retune their attention towards urban wildlife and understand themselves as part of an entangled network of creatures and architectures.