Karen Bondarchuk

“We live beneath a continuous rain of images; the most powerful media do nothing but turn the world into images and multiply it with the kaleidoscopic play of mirrors — images that are largely void of the internal necessity that ought to distinguish every image, as a form, and a meaning, as a force that lays claim to our attention, as a wealth of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of imagery dissolves immediately, like dreams, that leave no trace in memory, but a sense of the relevance and uneasiness remain.”

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the New Millenium

This body of work, translated as In Search of Lost Time, began as an exploration of unusual objects that I have collected or been given during most of my life. I have had a lifelong habit of collecting. Not just conventional collectibles like rocks and shells and driftwood but unusual items that cross my path: broken toys, crushed bottle caps, interesting bits of rusty metal and plastic. Each object contains a history and, in most cases, has outlived its usefulness. In the spirit of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, I am collecting “what the earth vomits up,” the debris of human existence that is often tossed to the curb.

Many objects show the ravages of time – rust, scratches, breaks – while some remain preserved in a timeless state. Most objects have been recontextualized or have undergone a metamorphosis, suggesting some new imagined form or being. I am fascinated, inspired and somewhat repelled by the detritus of human existence, knowing that it will exist long after I am gone. I am well aware of the toll that material culture has had on the health of our planet, and I am equally energized by the repurposing sensibility of the Arte Povera movement.

Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (commonly translated as “Remembrance of Things Past” or “In Search of Lost Time”), is one of the philosophical inspirations underlying this work, demonstrating a conceptual approach for me to follow. As Proust shows using the taste of a madeleine, reflexive artistic impulses can be triggered from a shape, color, pattern, image or other stimulus. Taking cues from found objects and images, I aim to create resonances visually -- in the way a tuning fork creates residual tone -- that evoke associations of past experience but which are also firmly rooted in the present.

I have utilized scavenger birds in my work for many years – principally corvids – to create visual metaphorical parallels of human experience. Their habitual behavior of picking and selecting elements from the world around them to better their lives – for sustenance, for entertainment, for folly and joy – is little different than what we humans do. Lives – whether human, corvid or other – entail forging what is possible amid the entropy and uncertainty one encounters. The work in this series ventures beyond the specific realm of corvids and more fully embraces the general turmoil of existence.

I recently read about a Ukrainian bird enthusiast named Oleksandr Nastachenko who documents and posts images of the avian world around his home in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. This eastern Ukrainian province in the Donbas region has had areas occupied by pro-Russian forces since 2014, and continues to be a war zone since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. I was deeply moved by the story of someone trying to find peace, beauty and normalcy in the face of constant terror and danger. (Since half of my family tree originates from the region in and around Ukraine, I feel a personal connection.) The majority of birds that appear in this work represent the birds documented by Oleksandr Nastachenko since the invasion of his country.

While this work embodies aspects of war, philosophy, myth, religion, literature, physics, politics, astronomy, biology, ecology and paleontology, there isn’t a central theme or narrative, nor is there an end goal. While the uniformity of the panel size, like pages of a book, suggests the potential for order, their irregular, staggered arrangement suggests an expanding universe (beginning with the big bang at the center) or a cloud of unknowing. In sum, there is no ultimate sense to the flood of objects and experiences that that make up this existence.

“Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.”

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, in Everything Everywhere All at Once

I began this series on August 1, 2014, as a way to honor my mother who was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I dedicated myself to creating a crow drawing every day for 365 days as a way of marking the passage of time that she no longer seemed to recognize. Crows have figured largely 
in my work for many years and represent both the quotidian and the extraordinary – akin to the Buddhist notion of “ordinary magic.” 

The labor that went into producing each of the 365 panels – cutting the wood, preparing my own gesso from gelatin and powdered limestone,
building up layers, and sanding between coats in
preparation for the actual process of creating an 
image – seemed to evoke the overwhelming labor and repetitious activities of motherhood. The series is simultaneously a marker for my mother’s lost time and a constant and acute reminder of my own days, my life, and an attempt to signal visually the preciousness and individuality of each day. Although the project seemed sober to me at its outset, quirky cheer and serendipity came to inhabit many of the panels. 

Under the auspices of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum, Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day began traveling nationally in 2018 as a self-contained exhibition, and has appeared in the following venues:

Union College, KY (2018)

Brinton Museum, WY (2019)

Huntington Museum, WV (2019)

Dennos Museum, MI (2020)

James Museum, FL (2021)

Richmond Center for Visual Arts, MI (2022)

Roger Tory Peterson Institute, NY (2023)

The Warehouse Eagle River Art Center, WI (2024)

Museum and Archives of North Vancouver, BC (2025)

Click here for information about the Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day traveling exhibition (Allison Slavick, touring exhibitions).

Exhibition Touring Sheet

This series was largely inspired by research into the evolutionary connections between dinosaurs and present-day birds. This work aims to suggest a larger continuum of life and death by using material and methods that embody those evolutionary cycles as well: the limestone base of the underlying gesso contains calcified fossils of ancient creatures, and the bony structures and images have been revealed — excavated – by digging and sanding beneath the pigmented surface of the panel itself. 

Some of the drawings resulted from researching the interrelatedness of life forms, during which I came across a recently discovered but long-extinct mammal called Indohyus. This cat-sized, deer-like creature had thick aquatic bones (like a hippo), which allowed it to remain submerged in water, but the most unusual feature of Indohyus is its inner ear, which is uniquely whale-like. It has been speculated that Indohyus is an important link in understanding how whales evolved from being terrestrial to aquatic creatures. In Bred in the Bone #7: Mobius Dick, the mobius (scroll) in the work is meant to suggest the ambiguity of where one type of existence begins and another ends, in evolutionary perspective, while retaining a sense of whimsy and archaic strangeness. Similarly, in Bred in the Bone #11: Shadow Relations, I have paired dolphins and a chamois to visually imply the biological connections between these creatures, which are real.

Bred in the Bone #1: I Get Around,Bred in the Bone #2: Family Tree and Bred in the Bone #12: Double Vision identify the evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and birds. The skeletal remains of Bambiraptor and Deinonychos, Cretaceous-era feathered dinosaurs that represent a link to contemporary birds, suggest lineage, family history, evolution and the interrelatedness of life forms over time.

In other panels (Bred in the Bone #4: Scripted, #5: Inversion, #9: Horse Sense and #10: Manner of Speaking), corvids are confronted by their mortality. Bred in the Bone #3: Mind the Gap introduces a time warp of evolutionary history with ruins from the Blitz of London during World War II, tracing back to my own family history (my mother was a girl in wartime London).

Bred in the Bone #6: Visionary and#8: Eternal Return contain astronomical depictions (the constellations Corvus and Lepus, or raven and hare) and gastronomical descriptions (a recipe for rabbit stew) in golden section and Fibonacci compositional divisions of 1:1.618. Evocations of deep space, time, and mathematics serve as backdrops to transient, corporeal beings suggesting recurrent cycles of life and death. 

Corvids are scavengers by nature, picking up and caching not just food but objects of interest to them, and so it seemed particularly fitting to accompany images of them with found articles of my own. After all, I have a lifelong habit too of gathering not just conventional collectibles like rocks and shells and driftwood but of somewhat unorthodox items that cross my path: broken toys, crushed bottle caps, interesting bits of rusty metal and plastic. I am both intrigued and somewhat repelled by the detritus of human existence, knowing that it will exist long after I am gone.

I began collecting blown-out tires from the sides of the interstate highways in Michigan, as I found the morphology of the material quite animal-like (coming from the numerous times I confused a dead tire with road kill from a distance). The sides and medians of interstate highways are uninhabitable and noisy dead zones, reeking of automobile exhaust and riddled with an amazing array of carcasses and garbage. Aside from the steady onslaught of passing traffic, the only company I kept during my debris-collecting jaunts was with the occasional crow.

Crows are scavengers by nature, and so am I. This work reinforces this connection, as they are created out of the scavenged scraps of tires I collected from the sides of Interstate 94 in Michigan. Most of the titles refer to the genus corvus (namely, crows and ravens in the corvid family) and the deflated tires that constitute them. These works, inspired as much by the concept of the material (scavengers made from scavenged materials) as the physical reality of “dead” tire pieces, are scaled with the intention of human identification with this highly intelligent species. Created during and following the Great Recession when the automobile industry in Michigan was largely expiring, these sculptures are open to the interpretation that they represent the death and rebirth of prosperity in the state, as well as the impact of the automobile industry on both the environment and the population. 

In their book titled In the Company of Crows and Ravens, Tony Angell and John Marzluff posit the notion that crows and humans engage in a mutualism of existence, wherein each affects the behavior of the other. They expand on this idea of a “cultural co-evolution” between humans and corvids throughout the book, and it is on this premise that I have continued to explore these remarkable birds. These drawings suggest the intricacies of human and animal relations, particularly the extent to which humans have come to dictate the terms of co-existence. 

In his recent book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong points out that

 "for all our vaunted intelligence, it is very hard for us to understand other creatures, or to resist the tendency to view their senses through our own…the ultimate feat of understanding [animals] always requires an informed imaginary leap.” 

 Yong goes on to note that many biologists study art to help them imagine the Umwelten (the sensory/perceptual worlds) of other animals, in order to “push against the limits" of our own, human Umwelt.

With a nod to the magic realism in Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2014 film Birdman, the raven in Western Visionary occupies an indeterminate space, afloat within a human surround and yet, perhaps even with humor, adapting to the strange juxtaposition of worlds in which it finds itself.

Two of the drawings in this section, Utopia and Boreal Oratorio, feature Egbert the raven. During a visit to British Columbia, I had the great honor of meeting this young raven after it was found injured on a path in the woods. As Egbert was nursed back to health, its adoptive family watched for several weeks as the fledgling struggled to figure out where it belonged. Torn between human comforts and the wild (as is seen in Boreal Oratorio), Egbert inevitably surrendered to the lure of the woods and ‘flew the coop,’ but continues to do periodic flybys to check in with its human family.

Playing off of Hans Holbein the Younger’s sympathetic portrait of Sir Thomas More, Utopia refers to the island society of More’s fictional account of an idealized but unattainable place. The raven in this work is Egbert and, like Holbein’s portrait of More, it attempts to visually capture its subject’s engagement in deep contemplation. By placing Egbert in a purely human context, I am alluding to the tendency for human intelligence to function as the yardstick by which we measure other creatures’ value.  

Humans go to great lengths to arrogate superiority over the animal world. Our intellectual history is rife with philosophies about the inferiority of non-humans, in fact:  Descartes famously referred to all animals as “automatons” while Kant and Aquinas denied moral status to animals.

The phrase and title — Intelligence is a murky subject — was taken from a recent BBC article titled “Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates,” in which the author discusses the futility of ranking intelligence in non-human creatures. Murky, indeed. As the bird’s banded leg indicates, this is a captive raven, known by his keepers as Ralph.

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Humans have long relegated non-human communication to singular onomatopoeias like “moo,” “neigh,” “oink,” “meow,” “woof,” etc. Once exclusive to birds, a tweet has been coopted to signify human chatter on social media. The corvids in this series of drawings look askance at the ubiquitous avian symbol, seemingly aware of its vacuity, prompting puzzlement, mild alarm and exasperation at this assault on their lives.

“Here I am a lord, at home a parasite.”

From a letter of Albrecht Dürer’s to a Venetian friend, October 1506

I encountered hooded crows for the first time on a summer trip to Berlin. In true corvid form they had made themselves at home in a public fountain, bathing and frolicking, largely ignored by the lunchtime crowd. Having read about hooded crows over the years, I was keenly aware that these beautiful and intelligent birds are regarded by many in Europe as annoyances and even vermin. It reminded me of Dürer’s insight about his lowly status at home in Nuremberg versus the admiration he was showered with in Venice. The large portrait titled Endürer hearkens back to northern Renaissance portraiture generally (and specifically to a 1498 self-portrait by Dürer) and was made out of my deep reverence for both the artist and the far-from-prosaic hooded crows.

The small studies were created during a six-week artist residency in Salzburg, Austria, as preliminary experiments for the larger drawings on gessoed panels. Channeling Hans Holbein and Lucas Cranach the Elder, these portraits emphasize character and individuality and employ singular rich colors to serve as a background. The crows, posed in portrait fashion, inevitably become surrogates for human presences.

Metaphysics

The simple, direct and physical nature of this series of drawings – thick charcoal on soft Rives BFK paper – has become for me a means to contemplate the enigma of existence, as the title of the series implies. Experiencing both a full solar and total lunar eclipse in the past two years spurred me to consider dualities: the stark contrast of black and white; complexity and simplicity; life and death; night and day; concept and object; the abstract or nonobjective versus vivified, natural representation. I strive to evoke tension between the extremes, which leaves the works posing questions rather than suggesting answers.

Synchrony (What’s in a Name)

Unlike the Metaphysics drawings, which are populated by unnamed wild ravens, these works feature individual captive birds that I have visited over the years in wildlife rehabilitation centers in Canada and the U.S. Each bird has been given a name – Bear, Hubert, Emily, etc. – marking their place in the human world. Both imprinted and injured, these birds are unable to survive in the wild and are permanent residents in various facilities. The level of photographic verisimilitude in these works is indicative of the intimate proximity I have shared with these otherwise wild (and in some cases, dangerous) creatures. Like the Metaphysics drawings in which dualities of image and meaning mix realism with ambiguous shapes, these works contain a graphic element whose presence is inexplicable in the logic of realism, as ill-understood as the inner nature of the birds themselves. 

My mother’s maiden name was Martin, which initially inspired the use of the common house martin in these works, a bird my mother would certainly have known as a girl in London in the 1930s and 40s. In contrasting these endearing birds with scraps of deteriorated metal and a turbulent atmospheric backdrop, I aim to evoke tonalities of feeling that have accompanied me since her death: the pervasive sense of in- between-ness that I often feel is part of existence, and a kind of longing for escape. My mother’s life was one of dislocations, starting at an early age when she was taken abruptly from England to Canada as a fourteen-year-old and continuing throughout her life until her final seven years with Alzheimer’s, her dislocation from herself. My mother's life was also one of resilience: she endured the horrors of war and the inherent challenges of raising five children but nonetheless managed to build a successful career as a legal editor, run for political office, and engage in environmental activism, among many other things. 

In keeping with her migratory avian surname, my mother traveled extensively and creatively adapted to her surroundings, putting together homes in Ontario and, later in life, in British Columbia. Like the common house martin, she was anything but common. 

The long history of Catholicism in Austria and Germany is evident in the many cathedrals I encountered during a residency there in 2019. A recurrent and ubiquitous leitmotif in these magnificent buildings – chubby putti that adorn the ceilings, walls, columns, tombs and niches of cathedrals – piqued my curiosity. Putti occupy a nebulous place in art history and are associated with both secular and religious ideologies. Pairing these endearing figures with skeletal remains of other species evokes themes I have explored in past work – the continuum of humans and animals, issues of human ‘superiority’ and animal ‘inferiority’, cultural aspects of human-animal relations and animal consciousness – while remaining non-prescriptive (a quality that I strive to achieve with this work).

One of the techniques that I have continued to explore with these experimental works is the use of pigmented inks and subtle patterning. (In these examples, for instance, I employed different brands of paper towels and toilet paper which I collected in Europe and the U.S. to form stamped patterns in the background while the ink was wet. The patterns on these utilitarian products evoke, when rendered visible, an aura of the baroque.)

In late winter during a late afternoon walk, I found a dead crow on WMU’s campus in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was in perfect condition – no apparent injuries or illness – and was strikingly beautiful against the snow. I had been drawing and sculpting crows and ravens for several years at that point, and had been thinking that perhaps I’d reached the end of corvid-related work in my studio.

Not so. The bird wound up in my freezer and eventually became the model for these drawings. 

I felt compelled to honor this particular bird with larger-than-life drawings, which turned into rather punning, playful works about the nature of being – questions about sacredness, the shape of the universe, evolutionary connectivity, etc. 

I chose to present the drawings on fabric scrolls inspired by Japanese kakejiku, with each section of the scroll having significance: the top or “ten” section representing heaven; the bottom or “chi” section representing earth and the “hashira” side pillars joining the upper and lower sections together. The ten is larger than the chi, as these scrolls were traditionally placed in tearooms and viewed from a low angle. Accordingly, the crow in these drawings hovers in an indeterminate space between heaven and earth.

This mishmash of drawings contains a connective thread: each work points to the intelligence of non-human species that is inevitably measured with a human yardstick, and the various stumbling blocks that non-human species are often required to navigate.

Every fall and winter in recent years, I have indulged local blue jays with peanuts in the shell, marveling at their orderly conduct as they respectfully took turns at the feeder (as is evidenced in the 2015 drawing below called Peanut Gallery). This past winter, however, their well-mannered feeding was supplanted by competitive battles, aggressive pecking and proverbial feathers flying. At a loss for explanation, I felt a pan-species commonality this spring as I watched frenzied hoarding at grocery stores amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Inspired by the cave art in France and Spain, as well as the writings of Fernando Pessoa, Plato and Charles Darwin, these works explore the territory between prehistory and history, as well as between human and animal. The intimate scale is intended to function as a form of family portrait. My identification with these archetypal creatures is as powerful as my sense of alienation, and throughout the work they are subjected to the various physical and conceptual pitfalls of human intervention. As Pessoa describes his estrangement from those around him in The Book of Disquiet,

“And once I’ve hurled myself into these souls, I suddenly feel helpless and empty, as if I’d died and yet I live, a sore and pale shade, which the first breeze will knock to the ground and the first physical contact dissolve into dust.”  

Kith and Kin attempts to capture the ambivalence of who or what may be found both kindred and alien.

Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?”

Barry Lopez, “Apologia”

Over a two year period, I found more dead birds than at any other time in my life. I’m not sure why – whether I was paying closer attention to the ground when I walked, or if I somehow attracted these delicate creatures – but instinctively I felt a responsibility to acknowledge the life that was. Drawing these birds on gessoed, cradled boards has been a means to substantiate their fleeting existences.

During a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, I found an injured Tennessee warbler on a nearby quiet road. It was still alive but obviously injured, and died soon after I carefully moved it to a nearby stump.

I felt a responsibility to honor this small creature in some way. I took the bird back to my studio and carefully laid it on the window sill. Only then did a poem I had taped to the wall the week before, written by another VCCA fellow, strike me anew.

Eight Unfinished Elegies by Alan Michael Parker

1. To the bird outside the hospital window, I have lost my mother dying.

2. My mother is a window through which I see the sky.

3. The small sounds of the machines keep my mother dying.

4. A bird flew into the glass: don’t touch.

5. As though on the window, I band my body.

6. Machines keep my mother dying: the sky is a machine keeping my mother dying.

7. The machine of the body dying.

8. Fitted in one hand, the body of my mother.

In ink and charcoal drawings, I have explored how best to represent the process of imprinting on birds. These drawings feature an imprinted screech owl named Hubert, a permanent resident at Barnswallow, A Wild Bird Concern (an extraordinary bird rehabilitation center in Wauconda, IL). Hubert is calm and relaxed around humans; however, in the presence of other birds and owls, Hubert becomes agitated and fearful. Hubert is apparently unaware of his identity as a screech owl and accordingly is frightened of his own species. These drawings are intended to manifest that identity confusion, as well as the manner in which material, process and scale can function as vehicles for meaning (imprinting interpreted with fingerprints and an increase in the owl’s size suggesting species transform).

Please visit Hubert (“Hubie”) at Barnswallow and check out Barnswallow’s Facebook page.

The overarching title for the series of framed charcoal drawings comes from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, and relates to my desire to understand the complexity and nature of ravens and crows, birds possessing the capacity to recall and mimic human language. I’ve had various encounters with talking corvids — a Connecticut raven named Julian, the blue jay Baby Blue, and a rascally, cursing green-eyed British jackdaw — and found, surprisingly, that their ability to speak makes these birds even more inscrutable. The language may speak less of them than it does of us, and our desire to comprehend them in human terms. 

These portraits are scaled with the intention of creating a meeting of minds or reciprocity: in as much as we are contemplating these brainy birds, they seem to be equally contemplating us. The stark, high contrast and large scale also demands our attention and consideration (as birds in the corvid family—crows, blue jays, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, ravens, etc.—so often do), while the emphasis on individuality and personality with each portrait challenges the generalities we may have regarding what a raven is. 

The title of this series of reduced plate linocuts of corvids comes from a line from Tennyson’s Ulysses, and alludes to our limited capacity to know that which “become(s) a name,” namely crows and ravens:

It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race, 

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me...

There is widespread empirical data on “destructive” or “pest” behaviors of crows and ravens, ranging from ravens stealing golf balls from golf courses (some even being snatched in mid-air) or ripping fiber optic cable from telephone transformers, to pecking large holes in small airplanes, snatching ice cream cones from children, tormenting dogs, etc. The Three Disgraces are intended as legal forums of (human) accusation and (raven) defense. The large scale is essential to the human identification in this work, equating the viewer with the subject of the drawing and emphasizing the formidable presence of these creatures.

These drawings are inspired by Ted Hughes’s 1972 poem, “Crow’s First Lesson.” 

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
“Love,” said God. “Say, Love.”
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

“No, no,” said God. “Say Love. Now try it. Love.”
Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito
Zoomed out and down
To their sundry flesh-pots.

“A final try,” said God. “Now, Love.”
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man’s bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest —

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman’s vulva dropped over man’s neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept —

Crow flew guiltily off.

I have spent several years following flocks of crows that congregate around Kalamazoo, and I am struck by the intensity and volume of their gatherings. There are hundreds of them filling the treetops and sky each fall and winter, and their vocalizations are a truly transporting force. I have listened and watched, trying to understand their enigmatic communication, but can often only find inadequate words to describe their calls.

In truth, crows really don’t say caw. They say a lot, loudly, and what they say is varied, complex and foreign. I have discovered in my research of bird books that there are a number of variations on the spelling of caw, including caa, kah, cah, kahr, ca-a, etc. I have also discovered that each culture has its own interpretation of the sound a crow makes; for example, Swedish crows say krax, Danish crows say kra-kra and Turkish crows say gaaak gaak. I just keep wondering what the crows are really trying to say, as our onomatopoeic interpretations clearly fall short of describing the intelligence of corvid communication. These drawings explore the reductive nature of language we ascribe to crows and how this crude phonetic mimicry limits our ability to recognize the complexity of animal communication. The repeated words form a visual screen that literally and metaphorically obscures our ability to clearly perceive and understand the nature of a crow.

The mixed media drawings in this series are a tangle of crows, the Iraq war, inadequacies of language and questions around identity and ontology. The drawings address these issues as microcosms of the larger struggle that exists between animals and humans, and the superiority that humans arrogate to themselves. The crows are little more than outlines; in many of the drawings, crows shape-shift into words, ancient texts, letterforms, graffiti and images. Language is both the medium and the message in these drawings, the visual and conceptual backbone, and embodies the capacity to clarify and confound. 

In my initial research for Babel, I discovered a cuneiform tablet from Girsu, Iraq, dating from 2400 BCE (now housed in the Louvre in Paris), a letter from a high priest to a king informing the latter of his son’s death in combat. I was immediately struck by the collapse of time and place that occurred with this clay missive: the death of a soldier almost 4500 years ago had the same devastating effect that families in the recent Iraq conflict experienced. Alexander the Great appears on coins falling like rain from the sky, much like Plutarch’s description of ravens falling dead from the sky as Alexander entered Babylon.

Legion explores identity and ontology from the perspective of the cartoon magpies Heckel and Jeckel (variously spelled Heckle and Jeckle). In this work, the two magpies converse about the nature of crow-ness, the fallibility of the Bush administration (particularly during hurricane Katrina), and the difficulty of realizing a truth of being. As these protagonists observe, their crow-ness is defined by humans who reduce their rich language to an imitative ‘caw.’ Identity in this work—be it human, crow or magpie—is in a state of flux, so that scribble gestures become a gestalt of a large human fingerprint, and human fingerprints flock together to create the form of a large crow. 

Ur-text contrasts the word that we designate as a crow’s vocabulary (caw caw) with what humans identify as babble (blah blah). The preponderance of language in this work ironically communicates nothing. 

Joint Memories is a double-entendre; it refers to the evolution of species—in this case, birds and humans—and the distinction between the furcula (wish bone) and collarbone. It also refers to the joint memories that Iraqis share with (primarily) Americans since the invasion in 2003. The crow in this image is comprised of the pillaged ruins of Tell-Jokha, Iraq, where looters chipped the ancient inscriptions from the façade of the temple. The homonymous tell-joke-ha ironically contrasts the humerus bone in a pun that elicits more sorrow than laughter.

Overdrawn is also a double-entendre, referring to the idea of withdrawing in excess of what can be sustained (namely, blood and oil), as well as the literally overdrawn, horror vacui nature of this drawing. A map of ancient Babylonian ruins appears and disappears across the entire drawing and, as in Ur-Text, words are meaningless blather. Here, they reside in a sea of blood-red hatch marks—loud and senseless chatter above the death toll of the Iraq war and, for the birds, mosquito-borne West Nile virus. 

Over the past several years, I have been drifting in and out of imagery and history from the “wild west.” Edward S. Curtis’s photographs, Fred Zinnemann’s classic 1952 film, High Noon, and the near extinction and relocation of every indigenous presence standing in the way of western expansion have all contributed to the inspiration for this work.