Dawn Chorus
FJORD is pleased to present Dawn Chorus, our 2026 Open Call exhibition bringing together the work of Abby Flanagan, Shona Macdonald, Frankie Modesto, Catherine Nelson, and Anne C. Smith. Each artist meditates on the natural world and how its melodies layer over and into our own, at times merging joyfully, more often into somber keys, and sometimes with a certain imprecise dissonance – but, above all, for each artist, with softness, piano, like humming, like fingers tapping.
In Abby Flanagan's tract (Map & Key) series, granular material — sand, plaster, soil, seed, bark, rust, ragweed — is poured into twin-wall polycarbonate panels and held in narrow vertical channels. The smaller works transcribe symbols taken from the key of a sedimentation map of the Edwards Aquifer in Central Texas; the larger panel reconstructs those symbols at scale, where they lose legibility. What remains is the residue of a system trying to describe ground it can only partially render, the map and the terrain drifting quietly out of agreement. Similarly, Catherine Nelson takes her material from riverbank clutter and industrial waterways, along with cues from mineral hues, local geology, lumber species, and fishing traps. She arranges made and found objects into vignettes that negotiate agency between hand and material, working with Osage orange, earth pigment, milk paint, and sunlight. Raised in Louisiana and attentive to toxicity and climate change, she turns toward the senses as a way of soothing grief both personal and shared.
Working from found photographs and memory, Shona Macdonald draws smog, haze, wind, flooding, and submergence. She is drawn to the psychological freight carried by the language of weather forecasting, where a phrase like "deep lows" names a barometric condition and an interior world in the same breath. Meanwhile, Anne C. Smith attends to what persists through change, “how the same river shows up differently every day; how home expands beyond walls as it inhabits the body; how, as a mother, to make space from both order and chaos.” Her abstract drawings and screenprints propose horizon lines, delicate linear structures, and shapes that divide the plane into windows, skies, and grounds: points of looking and longing.
Time appears as a cycle in Frankie Modesto's Gladly and Lightly Again — turning seasons, opening flowers, migratory birds arriving and departing — rendered in colored pencil and hung from a beech branch and twine as an homage to the balances and counterbalances of the natural world. Modesto’s drawings are, in his words, “my love letter to my home, and my bouquet of flowers to flowers themselves.”
About the Artists:
Abby Flanagan is an artist and educator based in Western Massachusetts. Her practice traces interconnections between environment and self, moving across drawing, sculpture, and installation to explore subjects of materiality, presence, and precarity. Flanagan completed a B.F.A. at Montana State University in 2015 followed by an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022. Her work has shown with galleries, art centers, and artist run projects such as shedshows in Austin (2024), North Loop in Williamstown (2023), NON STNDRD in St. Louis (2023), GrayDUCK in Austin (2023), Tinworks Art in Bozeman (2023), among others. She has participated in artist residencies at SOMA Summer in Veracruz, MX (2021), Orein Arts in Elmira, NY (2019), Burren College of Art Alumni Award Residency in County Clare IR (2016), and Mildred’s Lane in Narrowsburg, NY (2016). She has written for arts publications including Incandescent and served as visual art co-editor for the Bat City Review. She currently teaches Drawing in the Expanded Field at Amherst College.
abbyflanagan.com
Shona Macdonald was born in Scotland and is based in western Massachusetts. She received her MFA in 1996 in studio arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA in 1992 from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. Macdonald has exhibited widely and was a 2009 recipien of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award. Selected artist residencies include UCross, Ragdale, VCCA, and Roswell (all USA); and Can Serrat (Spain), Massey University (New Zealand), and Ballinglen and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland).
shonamacdonald.com
Frankie Modesto (b. 1999) is an artist from Chester County, PA currently living and working in Philadelphia. He received his BFA in painting and drawing from the Tyler School of Art in 2021.
frankiemodesto.com
Born in Louisiana and currently based in New Haven, Catherine Nelson is a visual artist working across media. She frequently uses wood, natural dyes, and metals, but her work often begins by processing landscapes through photography, drawing, and movement. She has exhibited internationally at venues including BronxArtSpace in New York, Redline Contemporary Art Center in Denver, AUTOMAT in Philadelphia, and Antenna Gallery in New Orleans. She has participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Denver Public Library's ideaLAB. She holds a BA from Duke University, a Post-Bacc Certificate from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA from the University of Connecticut.
catherinetnelson.com
Anne C. Smith is a visual artist from Washington, DC, whose work in drawing and screenprinting explores landscape, home, silence and imagination. Smith was a 2023 CARD Fellow, a collaborative program with the Phillips Collection, the Nicholson Project and DC Public Libraries. She earned an MFA in 2015 from George Mason University, where she studied printmaking and sculpture. She has taught classes and workshops at George Mason, the National Gallery of Art, Northern Virginia Community College and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center. She has participated in residencies at Washington Project for the Arts, the Kala Art Institute, and the Torpedo Factory Art Center. Smith’s work is found in private collections as well as the collections of the US State Department, Capital One, INOVA Hospital, and University of Maryland Global Campus. She is represented by Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington, MD.
annecsmith.com