The Fragile Key

The Fragile Key features new and recent work by contemporary painter Tiffany Bozic, developed in partnership with MarinMOCA and the Audubon Center, and presented at the Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Sanctuary. Through large-scale acrylic-on-wood panel paintings, Bozic examines relationships between species, ecosystems, and human perception. Each painting is grounded in careful observation and long-term engagement with the natural world, drawing on Bozic’s field research and ongoing collaborations with scientists and natural history institutions.

Installed within the historic Lyford House, large-scale paintings explore different ways of seeing and understanding the natural world. Together, they ask visitors to slow down and look closely at relationships that are often easy to overlook.

Extending beyond the Lyford House, a site-specific Art-into-Nature trail will place a series of small paintings throughout the sanctuary, each depicting a species found at Richardson Bay visually integrated into the place where it might naturally be encountered. Developed in collaboration with Audubon staff, the trail becomes a curated journey of attention: the paintings are not the destination, but an invitation to visitors to notice what is already there.

The exhibition aligns with shared values of conservation, stewardship, and public education. Rather than presenting nature as spectacle, The Fragile Key asks what happens when we slow down and pay attention to the living world around us. Set within a living sanctuary, the exhibition asks visitors to carry that attention beyond the paintings and back into the world around them.