Chelsea Lupkin
A film about reconnecting urban culture to the natural world, Fly By Night, follows artist Duke Riley as he attempts to fly thousands of pigeons wearing tiny LED lights off of a decommissioned Navy boat. Much more than an artist profile, it documents the journey of one man’s shared experience with an often overlooked New York resident – the pigeon. Over the course of several months, Olivia Loomis Merrion captures the peculiarity of pigeon auctions, training birds, and the high intensity up to showtime. Fly By Night will suck you into the contemporary artist sphere without making you feel like an outsider, but rather a participant in an urban environment that will feel as precious to you as it does its residents.
“My palms were actually sweating”
When Creative Time, an organization that commissions and presents public art projects, told their then video fellow, filmmaker Olivia Merrion, about their artist who was attempting to fly thousands of pigeons with LED lights to do a series of flights out of an old Navy boat, Merrion recalls her gut reaction – “My palms were actually sweating”.
Merrion was thus tasked with documenting the piece, as it was hardly something that could be contained in a museum setting. While her goal was to capture the show in a mostly archival way, her knack for storytelling ultimately gave Riley’s work new life. Not only did she encapsulate the magic of seeing the twinkling birds in the sky, she put a face and meaning behind the man and his team of people who made it all happen.
In many ways, Fly By Night is a love letter to New York with a bittersweet undertone. Once upon a time, pigeon coops were on every New York city rooftop, but today it’s a dying art. Through Merrion’s storytelling, Duke Riley becomes an unlikely champion of the birds that he describes as his spirit animal.
While many of us city dwellers may associate pigeons with disease carrying, dirty street creatures – let’s be honest – Riley and Merrion alike, all but turn our opinions around, both bringing the birds figuratively and metaphorically to street level so that we may see what they do. Dreamy and positively magical, Fly By Night, is a feel-good documentary film that let’s you partake in an old city tradition.
Merrion is currently a Filmmaker-in-Residence with Glassbreaker Films, a studio embedded in the Center for Investigative Reporting newsroom, producing a series of shorts with other filmmakers. Independently, Merrion is also working with a few creatives from this short project, including filmmaker John Picklap and composer Aled Roberts, on a coming of age story about a man from the Bronx who has a traveling insect petting zoo, set to be completed this summer.