Catch and Release

Seattle artist No Touching Ground, aka. NTG, has long explored the spaces within our urban environments that play host to wildlife. His work not only focuses on the lives of the coyotes, wolves, bears and birds who become displaced as city landscapes take over their habitats, but he also prophesies their eventual return. NTG's most recent project looks closely and poetically at pigeons.

Using hand built traps, carriers and coops, NTG caught 50 pigeons in Seattle. He then wrote a 50-word story, cut the story into sections, and released the birds back into the wild carrying a single word of the story affixed to its leg. The resulting show, titled "Catch and Release," combines elaborate and delicate "portraits" of each pigeon along with the traps, coops, seeds and other artifacts of the process in a lovely and unexpectedly touching installation.

The exhibit opens tonight at pun(c)tuation on Capitol Hill and runs through December 29.