Embracing the superimposed style that is a current favorite among photographers, Aviary by Sara Angelucci, an artist based in Toronto, Canada, overlays images of birds on top of vintage portraits. Hauntingly surreal, these human-animal hybrids represent something larger than themselves.
“The photographs in Aviary embody many themes of the nineteenth century,” Angelucci writes. “Born of the domestic realm, they express a conflation of interests where the family photo album, with its role of commemoration, is brought together with natural science and spiritual emanations. Made by combining photographs of endangered or extinct North American birds with anonymous nineteenth century cartes-de-visite portraits—they portray creatures about to become ghosts. Of the two extinct birds featured in the series, the plight of the passenger pigeon is particularly telling. Once the most numerous bird in North America, numbering in the billions, it was wiped out by 1914 through a combination of brutal over-hunting and habitat destruction.”
By combining the two, Aviary by Sara Angelucci makes a poignant observation that people are as fragile as nature and wildlife. Yet it also comments on the idea of stepping into another perspective entirely. Angelucci asks, “Might we then imagine the Aviary portraits as chimera suspended in a state of empathy, and wonder what our treatment of other sentient beings might be if we could feel what they feel, or see what they see?”
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