Steffani Jemison’s Untitled (Same Time / black bird) is an installation that considers how living beings move through and inhabit shared spaces—shaped by boundaries, ownership, and ideas about who does and does not belong. The artist’s research into the often uneasy relationship between human and birds becomes the entry point into these larger questions, examining coexistence as negotiated through proximity and conflict. These dynamics become especially visible in the objects humans have developed to control where birds land, nest, and move. Bird spikes, reflective ribbons, holographic materials, predator decoys, and other commercial deterrents are designed to keep birds away from human-occupied spaces through illusions of light, movement, or appearance. Yet their effects can be unpredictable: birds frequently ignore or adapt to these devices, while the same qualities intended to repel them—shimmering surfaces, flashes of color—can be attractive to people. Jemison is drawn to these contradictions and to what they reveal more broadly about the ways humans divide space, determine access, and mark certain bodies as out of place. 

For Off the Wall, Jemison brings these questions into a wall-length installation of eight lenticular prints mounted across a reclaimed theatrical backdrop. Depicting a generic American main street divided into distinct spaces—a bank, salon, and other businesses—the prop draws viewers into a scene that feels both recognizable and visibly artificial, carrying with it the assumptions that shape how such spaces are imagined and who or what belongs within them.

The lenticular prints are set within windows along the painted streetscape, introducing images—made with acrylic paint, photographs, text, and holographic ‘bird scare’ ribbon—informed by Jemison’s research into birds and deterrence. Several reference a 1917 Audubon Society publication documenting birds observed in Texas, including the grackle, a species deeply adapted to human environments and frequently seen as a nuisance. The prints’ bright, reflective surfaces distinguish them from the backdrop, making the windows appear to open onto other settings beyond the main street and the physical space of the installation. Made from multiple images layered into a single surface, lenticular prints reveal changing, sometimes overlapping views when seen from different angles. Like the bird deterrents they reference, Jemison’s prints prompt movement as each shift in position brings different images into view. 

No singular position reveals the entirety of Untitled (Same Time / black bird), its elements emerging and receding as the viewer moves along the installation. Through these shifting perspectives, visual illusion becomes a means of choreographing the viewer’s experience, revealing how bodies are deterred, attracted, transported, or redirected through what they see. This relationship between perception and movement returns to the research at the heart of the project, where questions of access and spatial control take form through imagined architectures, illusory thresholds, and unreliable deterrents. Untitled (Same Time / black bird) draws out these tensions, suggesting that the divisions between belonging and trespass are themselves constructed, their instability made visible as bodies move through and across the boundaries made to contain or exclude them. 

Off the Wall at the Brochstein Pavilion is a partnership between the Moody Center for the Arts and the Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The series commissions Core Residency Program alumni to create site-specific installations for this space, which will be on view for one year.

Off the Wall: Steffani Jemison, Untitled (Same Time / black bird) is organized by Claudia Mattos, Associate Curator, Moody Center for the Arts. It is made possible by the Brochstein/Hecht Family and by Susan Brochstein in memory of Raymond Brochstein.

About the Artist

Steffani Jemison (b. 1981, Berkeley, CA) is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and writer whose practice encompasses moving image, performance, sculpture, drawing, and writing. Her work has been presented widely at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, among others. Jemison is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Creative Capital Award, and the 2021 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York, NY, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, and currently serves as Associate Professor of Art & Design at Rutgers University, NJ.