Extinction Studies
2018 - ongoing
In my recent series entitled "Extinction Studies," I look to the past to help imagine the future, as I have also done in my projects at the Broad Institute. Fascinated with finding so many locations that have animals’ names such as “Little Otter Pond” or “Salmon River” on maps of the Adirondacks, I started tracing the names of these animals and other creatures from the maps and covering everything else in black ink. This work is an attempt to imagine both past and future, as scientists suspect that we may be living through a sixth mass-extinction of species in Earth’s history. In the era of the Anthropocene, we are experiencing loss and death of thousands of species at a significantly faster rate. Floating in the sea of blackness, these names become stars in the sky, constellations, and ghosts of our memories of places we hold dear.
Since I was introduced to the Adirondacks region through an art residency in 2005, this region became a very important place in my heart.
