Ornithurae exhibited at Olsen Gruin Gallery in New York and opened by actress Brooke Shields, featured large-scale portraits of doves, pigeons and cockatoos, each rendered with the gravity typically reserved for human subjects. The exhibition reframed how we perceive these birds - particularly pigeons, while street pigeons are often dismissed, their rainforest relatives are visually spectacular and are cognitively remarkable. As Tim Low wrote in an essay for the exhibition,
“Psychologists take pigeons seriously… Domestic pigeons in experiments have distinguished letters of the alphabet, different emotions on human faces, paintings by Picasso and Monet, and even breast cancer tumours on scans. In one test, categorising coloured rectangles on a screen, pigeons left university students far behind. Brains wired to detect tiny seeds on gritty ground do well with a different kind of flat surface."
Jeffreys’ work urges us to reconsider the hierarchies we impose, inviting viewers into an encounter of dignity, recognition, and shared sentience.
