Endlings

Opening Reception
Thursday, April 16, 6 – 9 pm
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Endlings is a two-room installation using lens-based technologies to examine institutional observation, extinction, and the violence of the gaze. The work centers on Martha, the last passenger pigeon, whose 1914 death catalyzed modern conservation while revealing how museums function as sites of both preservation and erasure.

Room one employs Pepper’s Ghost projection – a nineteenth-century optical illusion – to animate Martha within a miniature recreation of her Cincinnati Zoo enclosure. Viewers peer through a small aperture to see the projection on glass, forcing intimate proximity with her captivity. The looping animation creates “extinction-on-loop”: Martha perpetually reanimated by the systems that destroyed her, never allowed to rest, mirroring contemporary de-extinction projects seeking to genetically resurrect the passenger pigeon.

Room two inverts the optical apparatus. A camera obscura positioned to observe room one allows viewers to watch other visitors through this historical scientific instrument. The lens inverts the image, rendering human observers strange and specimen-like. Crucially, the camera obscura image exists only in the moment of viewing: look away and it disappears. This ephemeral quality mirrors the impermanence of species themselves – present one moment, irretrievably gone the next. Viewers occupy Martha’s position: observed, catalogued, objectified through optical technologies of surveillance and documentation, their presence as fleeting as hers. 

The work interrogates how lens-based media – projection, camera obscura, museum display, scientific documentation – have functioned as tools of colonial control over nature and narrative. By situating viewers within overlapping systems of observation, Endlings asks: What does it mean to be an endling? And as humans face potential extinction through ecological collapse, who will remain to observe us?