Five larger-than-life bronze representations of extinct bird species are scattered throughout North America, standing like sentinels in the places where each was last sighted. They are shadow-like in their dark patina and sleek,
minimal details, silent tributes watching over the places where their species socialized, bred, and fed their young before vanishing from the earth.
The sculpture’s creator, artist Todd McGrain, will be present on Thursday, February 5, at the Rockwell Museum (111 Cedar
Street, Corning) for a screening of “The Lost Bird Project,” a documentary
about his work. McGrain
will introduce the film and be on hand to answer questions about his work as a
sculptor, as well as about his current project, which is on forest elephants of the
Central African Republic.
The Lost Bird Project statues were
featured in the Memorial Art Gallery’s third Rochester-Finger Lakes Biennial in
2008. McGrain’s project originated 15 years ago “without
a real, clear ambition,” he says. He had been working
on a sculpture based on the form of a duck when he came across “Hope Is the
Thing with Feathers” by Christopher Cokinos, which chronicles
the author’s relationship to the stories of extinction of North American birds.
McGrain’s sculpture became an elegy for the Labrador duck.
The last recorded sighting of the species was a bird that had been shot in Elmira, New York, where the
sculpture now stands.
The birds McGrain
started with — the Labrador duck, Great auk, Heath hen, Carolina parakeet, and
Passenger pigeon — were selected because they all have very different habitats
and ecologies, he says. “The choice of the five helped express a range of
extinction stories — the causes of extinction and the places where it unfolded.”
“In general, contemporary extinction is
caused by overexploitation and habitat loss,” McGrain
says. “The Labrador duck was primarily driven to extinction because of
pollution on the industrializing eastern seaboard. The Passenger pigeon was
driven to extinction because of market hunting.”
Since completing the sculptures, McGrain has worked to negotiate permanent placement for
them at the sites where each species was last spotted. He traveled with his
brother-in-law, Andy Stern, to scout meaningful permanent sites for the sculptures.
“We began to realize that the stories of
placing the birds was one of the ways we could raise awareness about
extinction,” McGrain says. “Forgetting is another
kind of extinction.”
They collaborated with Middlemarch films to
produce a documentary that tells both the stories of the birds and the journey
of getting the memorials placed in locations as diverse as Florida’s swamps and
Newfoundland’s rocky coasts.
“As memorials, the sculptures could help add
the history of these animals to the places where they were driven to extinction
or last seen in the wild,” McGrain says.
McGrain will close the evening with a signing for his recently published book. The
event will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. and costs $10 to attend ($5 for
students, free to members). Seating is limited, and advance reservations are
recommended. For more information, visit www.rockwellmuseum.org/events.
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2015.
