Ecological anxiety romps with disco-dancing starlings in Graeme Patterson’s brilliant, playful, and disturbing Strange Birds, in its showing in Halifax in the fall. Patterson turns our worst nightmares into a hybrid world of fiction and reality, human and bird, combining hand-built and high-tech media that would appeal as much to Victorian dollhouse lovers as 21^st century computer geeks.

“With this body of work, I’m trying to speak visually, to tell a story without words,” Patterson said in an interview in the dimly lit, sonic Dalhousie Art Gallery, the final destination for the show. “I’ve always had trouble speaking with words.”

A complex, five-year project that spanned the pandemic, Strange Birds reaches forward introducing three new technologies, virtual reality, 3-D printing and a video game, into Patterson’s practice, while also recalling previous projects like Woodrow, in which he meticulously rebuilt his grandparents’ house to talk about his childhood and a vanishing rural community on the Prairies.

Curator and catalogue essayist Ray Cronin has worked with Patterson for over 20 years. The two met in the 2000s when Patterson, a NSCAD University student at the time, was hired to install exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia when Cronin was its director.

“I was intrigued by the way his brain worked,” Cronin said at a panel discussion. “He came to NSCAD with a stop motion animation he knew he was going to make. Every course he took had something to do with that.

As far as Cronin is concerned, “with Graeme you basically give him an opportunity and get the hell out of the way and genius happens.”

Fifteen years ago, the NSCAD University graduate and two-time Sobey Art Award finalist (2014, 2020) bought a house in a small university town at the edge of the Tantramar Marsh, known for its migratory birds and waterfowl. In the winter of 2019, he was at home when a 60-foot tree fell on his house.

“That shocked me and put eco-anxiety into my relationship with the house I’ve set my roots in,” he said. “The house became the place of internal anxieties.”

Taking over an entire wall of the gallery, Patterson’s 30-minute titular video, Strange Birds, is the emotional heart and soul of his world-of-wonders show. It features a beautiful, lamenting score composed by Patterson and a story of ecological collapse, with a backdrop of gorgeous landscape photography.

In Strange Birds, Patterson weaves a cautionary fable of internal and external anxiety around climate crisis with anthropomorphized birds as avatars. To tell his story, the artist becomes both the frenzied Space Disco Starling and the elegant, balletic Blue Heron, a solitary character. Costumed in a sparkling black disco suit for the starling and a beautiful feathered and winged jacket for the heron, Patterson performs both characters, which are filmed against a green screen then digitally animated. These figures along with a lone fox are brought to life across a range of media throughout the exhibition.

When the disco-dancing starling arrives he overpopulates the land, destroying the environment. Leafless white trees with jagged black stumps for branches corkscrew up and down into the earth in a reference to monocultures. Patterson includes several recognizable built structures from the Sackville area including the rail bridge, wind turbines, and the odd, 14-storey berry freezer called “the Cube” by locals.

In Patterson’s mythical narrative, when the waters rise and flood—a nod to scientific predictions for the Tantramar area–the starling floats away on his house, crawling uncomfortably on the metal roof as the water laps up above the windows. The great blue heron, the calm observer who has appeared majestically surveying the land, survives.

A work of visual poetry, the video is both compelling and scary, surreal yet familiar. Catalogue essayist Melanie Zurba, associate professor for the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University, told the panel ecological grief is “very palpable in the world and it’s something that is numbing sometimes.” Zurba explains further, “It’s not always the grief we expect; sometimes it’s a disengagement, sometimes it’s a need to party like the starlings do. Maybe we are all strange birds trying to navigate this really difficult time together.”

Patterson is fascinated by the starling as an invasive, aggressive bird that fights native species for food and territory. He is also drawn to their characteristic murmurations and worked with his mentor, artist Rita McKeough, on the 2016 interactive media installation Murmurations, exhibited at the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville.

Now ubiquitous and considered a pest in North America, the European starling was introduced in the early 1890s by American amateur ornithologist Eugene Schieffelin on a colonial whim. He released imported starlings in New York’s Central Park as part of a project to bring all the birds mentioned in Shakespearean plays to the United States.

In Strange Birds the starling is a destructive colonizer in the beautiful, preserved wildlife area of Tantramar, the homeland of the Blue Heron. This region, with a long colonial history which included clashes between the French and English, is now home to numerous species of birds and ducks. The Tantramar Marsh is protected by the Canadian Wildlife Act, which according to Zurba is misleading. She explains that it seems as though it is “being protected for future generations;” however, this land was stolen and “the Canadian Wildlife Act shows how settlers want to protect land, but the First Peoples no longer have access to it.”

If pain lies at the core of the Strange Birds video, it is balanced throughout the exhibition with playfulness and discovery as Patterson reveals all the magical, moving parts to his elaborate vision. The show’s centrepiece is a giant dollhouse replica of Patterson’s home, perched on the stump from the fallen tree. Meticulously, exquisitely, perhaps obsessively hand-built, the house is full of exacting details and visual surprises. Front doors open and close with flashing lights as a “hello,” says Patterson, though they also suggest emergency vehicle lights and power flickering on and off during a storm.

The viewer peers through windows, from the basement to the attic, to see highly detailed rooms including the bedroom, the artist’s studio, and the kitchen where the starling dances on a chair. Meanwhile, a cute, perplexed-looking fox is a visitor in the guest room, paying homage to domesticated wild animals living in the “chaos” of the human world, says Patterson. The fox is reflected in a mirror as he looks out into the living room and above the mantle to see the dancing starling on a tv screen.

The house is one of three “bird cages,” Patterson said. He also built a standing billboard like the large road signs on the isthmus between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Covered by a tarp and decaying, it feels apocalyptic. Animated starlings move within a labyrinth of support structures on the back of the billboard as if they were trapped in a video game; here they are victims of the architecture of humans, instead of aggressors. Nearby is a model of a rusted trailer on a plinth.

The artist explains, “This trailer was outside Struts Gallery for a decade; we never knew what was inside. I saw it as an ugly structure left there and holding part of who we are.” (It turned out there was nothing ominous inside, just old tires.) Peering into Patterson’s exquisite reincarnation of the trailer the viewer is drawn to a film, deep inside on its back wall. In it, three starlings are having a dance party, completely heedless of what’s going on in the world.

Patterson loves to dance, or, as catalogue essayist and poet Sue Goyette said at the panel discussion, “That dude can move.”

“Even when I was little, dance was something I trusted,” Patterson said. “The dance is an oblivious sense of freedom the starling has and it’s everywhere and it makes the work light and playful.”

Dance and Music have long been part of Patterson’s work. In 2011, he was nominated for a Juno award for record package of the year as art director of Wintersleep’s New Inheritors. He and Halifax artist Mitchell Wiebe are also behind G.L.A.M Bats, a musical duo that hosts dance and karaoke parties. The pair performed at Nocturne Halifax in autumn 2024, and at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, in spring 2024, in conjunction with the Strange Birds exhibition

A gamer himself, Patterson created his first video game for Strange Birds, aptly referring to it as “a fun by-product that unlocks the dance.” The Dancer allows the viewer to use a traditional gaming controller to program Space Disco Starling’s movements on screen from over 50 homemade dance moves with fun names like silver fox strut, gingersnap spin, and electric gumby.

There are many delightful bonuses in Strange Birds including a scattering of 20 QR codes on the floor. Like “easter eggs” to be found, they take viewers to additional music videos featuring the starling.

As Patterson built the house, he made 3D scans of all his set pieces in order to create an exciting, virtual reality experience. By putting on the headset, the viewer is transported inside the house and nose to beak with the starling. It’s as if one had drunk the shrinking potion from Alice in Wonderland.

“Inside the house’s mind I can open these doors,” Patterson said. “It’s like the house is dreaming in a sense. Some dreams are intense, and some are calming.”

Patterson explains the use of VR as another access point to his work, “another way to tell a narrative; you choose your own adventure or open your own world. To be able to be inside a miniature world is something I always wanted.”

Patterson, who graduated from NSCAD University in 2002, works organically from the seed of an idea, in this case the fallen tree. Of his process, he reflects, “I start broad and fuzzy around the edges. Ray can see these visions and where they are going.”

Cronin curated Woodrow, Patterson’s first breakout worldbuilding show in 2005, at the AGNS. “Every piece from Woodrow was purchased including by the National Gallery of Canada; Graeme became the youngest artist acquired at that time.”

Outlining his wholistic approach, Cronin explains, “Graeme works in series; it’s a whole world all the time. If there is graphic design, Graeme does it; if there is a movie, he’s done it. He does the coding. It’s completely controlled by Graeme’s vision.”

In making work rooted in personal experience and place, Patterson was, according to Cronin, out of step with the “heavy irony” popular in art school at the time.

“His first show was about how much he loved his grandparents and how sad he was that his grandfather had died. That was unique. It was not about politics, or where society was failing, but you can find all of that stuff in his work,” says Cronin.

Patterson’s major multi-media installations have each featured models of houses. His second hybrid world of dream and reality, sculpture and film, Secret Citadel, 2013, explored difficulties in male friendship through the interaction of an anthropomorphic bison and cougar. It included a model of his childhood home in Saskatoon.

All three works are about home, life’s passages, friendship, and loneliness; they express universal emotions like anxiety, love and joy.  They are also about storytelling itself, as Patterson communicates a dominant narrative through many different avenues, with recurring imagery across media as varied as sculpture, costumes, miniature replicas, moving image, and new technologies, and more—he even made a whole film featuring the virtual reality content for people who couldn’t, or didn’t want to, put on a VR headset.

“If Woodrow was about childhood and Secret Citadel about adolescence and growing up, then Strange Birds is about being an adult, a homeowner, and a member of a community,” Cronin says. The undercurrents are about “how we live, how are we living in this world, how are we being respectful, aware of the environment,” said Cronin, “it’s very personal and because it’s so personal that’s what gives it so much power.”

Patterson is entrenched in his home community and landscape of Sackville, and Strange Birds seems to be a love letter to the haunting beauty of the area. The artist hosts karaoke and dance parties in his community and works on creative collaborative projects often involving costumes and performance. He is active with the artist-run centre, Struts Gallery, and is on the board of Sappyfest, a popular summertime music festival held in Sackville. “Community is very important to me,” says Patterson, “especially in a small town like Sackville. I am always excited to support collective creativity.”

Strange Birds was organized and circulated by Beaverbrook Art Gallery, where it ran from Jan. 16 to May 12, 2024, and Dalhousie Art Gallery, where it ran from Sept. 6 to Nov. 10, 2024. An iteration of Strange Birds, curated by Matthew Hills, was also exhibited at Grenfell Art Gallery, Newfoundland, from May 26 to Aug. 4, 2024. The Strange Birdscatalogue, designed by Patterson, includes essays by Cronin, Zurba and Goyette, and is available at Beaverbrook Art Gallery and AGNS.