From the artist

I created the piece 1.September. 1914: 1:00 PM as a kind of memorial to Martha, the last passenger pigeon. She died in the Cincinnati Zoo at the age of 24. During her lifetime there had been a nationwide search for another passenger pigeon, to no avail. The extinction of the passenger pigeon is the only extinction in which the precise date and time is known and documented. 

The cabinet is intended to evoke a Victorian zoo exhibit, with Martha’s public extinction in the front and the male zookeeper’s private world in the back. I used accumulated ephemera to attempt to create a sense of a world which would allow such an extinction to happen. The pseudo-zoo enclosure is papered with pages from turn of the century National Geographic magazines, many with casually racist or sexist captions. 

Meanwhile the oil painting in the enclosure is meant to suggest a dying dream Martha might have had; one of freedom and vastness. The back of the cabinet, festooned with zookeeper’s keys and the aforementioned ephemera– including images of boxing matches and handwritten notes–was intended to give the atmosphere of a clubhouse for men. Thus, the pairing of professional zookeeping practice and macho posturing lies behind the disappearance of a species.