Crazy aviary at the Walker

Oh, to be a kid again. Wandering into the colorful birdland that Berlin-based, Swedish-born artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg have installed at Walker Art Center, it's tempting to scrunch down to kid-height just to get the full effect of being surrounded by all their fine feathered friends.

Fashioned by Djurberg out of bent wire, painted canvas, foam, resins, glue and other flotsam, the 80-some birds range from chicken-size to full fledged ostrich. None is quite barnyard proper, although they've got all the jiggling wattles, piercing eyes and ruffled feathers any Old MacDonald would expect.

Still, no nursery-rhyme bird is quite as jazzy as this flock of blue-backed turkeys with teal breasts and hot pink feet, raspberry-beaked pelicans with curry legs, red-eyed flamingoes with orchid bodies, a scabrous beady-eyed vulture, a polka-dot pea hen, a rainbow crow and unnamed critters out of comic nightmares. Despite their frozen poses, the birds are so lively they seem to be continually preening, stretching, staring, yawning, flapping and otherwise carrying on.

And they're just the 3-D foreground to one of the more engaging and unexpected Walker shows in recent memory. Five of Djurberg's Claymation videos are continuously projected onto the walls around the birds, creating a fluid, flickering fantasyland of imagery suggestive of folk tales, morality plays, Punch and Judy shows and Freudian mythology.

While birds occupy the gallery, cartoonish humans populate the videos -- a devil with pet alligator, a black woman menaced by snakes, a scrawny naked infant, grossly overweight babushkas, Venetian punchinellos in beaky carnival masks. With their huge crimson mouths, wild eyes and expressive gestures, the Claymation figures are attacked, fed, dismembered, carried off, hugged, eaten, hatched, comforted and otherwise subjected to all the allegorical tribulations, and even a few of the triumphs, of life as we know it.

Each video lasts a mere five minutes but seems longer thanks to the vivid, fast-paced action. Smartly executed -- with appealing nonverbal soundtracks by Berg -- the videos are darker and more macabre than the bird sculptures, but no less fascinating. Despite the show's obvious kid-friendly elements, it is not necessarily suitable for all. Some of the animations have an unsettling edge of cruelty, violence and sexuality that may distress some viewers.

Prize-winning appeal

During a break while installing the show last week, they talked about their collaboration. Their films and installations have been shown at galleries and smaller venues in the United States but the Walker exhibit is the most ambitious to date. After it closes Dec. 31, the show will travel to the New Museum in New York next spring and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the fall.

"I use animals a lot in my work as a metaphor for something else," Djurberg said. At first she planned to create a parade of fairly realistic birds, she said, because certain avian behavior often mirrors human activity, such as mating rituals and dating. But the more she worked, the more abstract and fanciful the birds got until the project "became more and more about painting and sculpture as a medium and a search for what color does to you," she said.

Animation using clay figures offers similar imaginative freedom. "If you used actors it would be easier to make something more realistic, but with animation there is an exaggeration that's more comic," she said. "It's kind of like a parade of stereotypes; that's why everything is symbolic and they have the masks."

Berg's music complements the antic grace of the bird sculptures and the comic but sometimes brutal incidents in the videos. Djurberg anticipated that he would produce a marching score, since the birds are supposedly on parade, but instead he did "something mystical and a little bit mysterious," she said.

Music's power is that it "evokes feelings and is faster than your eyes," Berg said. "You don't have time to interpret it. It goes straight into your feelings."

With its seductive beauty and storybook cruelty, Djurberg's work sometimes recalls that of American artist Kara Walker. Whereas Walker typically explores racial violence in the antebellum South using a black-and-white palette, Djurberg employs ripe colors and characters from European tales in a similar probing of grotesque behavior and harsh narratives.

"I really like her work," Djurberg said of Walker. "It's very important that she's not afraid to cross the border and push it. She manages to be very poetic and beautiful while showing the horror.