The George Eastman House exhibit, in 2012, of Todd McGrain’s Sculptures from The Lost Bird Project, offered me an unexpected opportunity for closure. When I was young, I had read about the fate of the Passenger Pigeon and many other extinct species that had passed from the earth only a few generations earlier than my own birth. A sense of profound loss followed me as I matured and read works such as A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and Wildlife in America by Peter Matthiessen. These were among other classics of environmentalism that I found in the library of my mother, who was a bird watcher as well as a lover of art and music. Somehow the story of the Passenger Pigeon touched me the most. Decades after I read of the species’s demise, I finally connected to a sense of mourning while visiting Todd’s sculptures. This was also true as I watched Todd’s film on this project during one of his visits to the museum.
On the last weekend of the visit of the Lost Bird to Rochester, I did my own photographic homage to Todd’s collection of sculpture. And a few months later, I also wrote a poem entitled Lament for the Lost Birds as another statement on the sense of the tragic loss within our world.
Photographs take at a visit to the George Eastman House Gardens of Sculptures from The Lost Bird Project by Todd McGrain
© 2014 Studio Michaelino and Michael E. Tomb
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