Exhibits & Events

Dawn Chorus

Abby Flanagan, Shona Macdonald, Frankie Modesto,

Catherine Nelson, and Anne C. Smith

Aug 22 - Sep 26, 2026

Opening Reception: August 22nd 6-9pm

Gallery Hours: Saturdays from 1-5PM and by appointment
FJORD, 1720 N 5th St, G2, Philadelphia, PA 19122

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.”

Join us in viewing the exhibition during the opening reception, Saturday August 22, 6-9pm and on Saturdays during open hours, 1-5pm.