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“The color brings you in” to The
Miner’s Canary
Project, an ongoing series of sculptures whose focal point is an
assemblage of enameled bright yellow birds. Ironically, the effect
of the birds’ dazzling color is similar to the visual delight
of a wedding cake: an architectural confection celebrating union
and heralding life. Here instead, the representations are lifeless,
strewn in carefully layered pyramids and piles in cages or on top
of them—their color emblematic of the canaries used by miners
in their search and seizure of one of earth’s fossil fuels:
anthracite coal. The color is signage for an abstraction leading
us finally to the detrimental effects of human interaction with
the earth, a representation of the carnage of human habitation
and our dependence upon solar energy.
Captive, the canaries warn of danger. No longer useful, the inert
birds discarded by their human captors are heaped in a communal
grave. But Moore’s work alludes to the question of who
is captive? At one moment it is the birds that are caged by their
human counterparts, men gouging the earth for valuable energy;
in the next, it is the miners themselves who may be trapped in
their descent into the earth. Finally, it is our dependence upon
fossil fuels that imprisons us.
Moore’s use of color inverts our usual expectations of
the hues. In some of the pieces the birds rest upon their cages
while lustrous black coal is contained within a wooden or metal
frame. Perhaps coal is a metanym of culture’s attempt
at constraining nature. The visual contrast is stark and stunning.
It is the vibrancy of the black coal--pure energy, its shimmering
complexity that suggests life, while death is symbolized by a
deeply saturated monochromatic yellow.
In this sculpture of abstracted and unvarying shapes, the birds
suggest trophies or placards deprived of the freedom of their nature;
the idiosyncratic is eschewed for the power of numbers lost in
human history and geological time. Noticeably, the birds share
only color and form; there are no individuating characteristics
distinguishing one bird from another. It is only their position
in the mound that suggests discrete bodies.
Moore’s inspiration is geology and paleontology. One of his
encounters with rock formations and fossil remains trapped in layers
of stone suggested to him the story of a genocide; traces of natural
or human disaster in which ancient life forms were extinguished
leaving an imperceptible imprint of their existence. The miners’ canaries
like the ancient fossils are victims of such disasters, one day
to be discovered-- or not-- by other probing eyes.
Moore sees this work as ongoing; each piece in the series represents
another moment in our interaction with the earth, our attempts
to control and wrest its resources and harness them for our civilization.
The cages allude to our own nests, the habitat we continue to
foul with the remnants of our violence and avarice and the toxicity
of our present/presence.
-jt |
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