Mcgrain, Todd

The Lost Bird Project - movie on DVD

Forgetting is another kind of extinction

Lost Bird Project (2012)

DVD

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Subject

Animals In Art
Birds

Plot

Gone and nearly forgotten in extinction, the Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, the Heath Hen, the Carolina Parakeet, and the Passenger Pigeon leave holes not just in the North American landscape but in our collective memories. Moved by their stories, sculptor Todd McGrain set out to create memorials to the lost birds—to bring their vanished forms back into the world. The Lost Bird Project follows the road-trip that McGrain and his brother-in-law, Andy Stern, take as they search for the locations where the birds were last seen in the wild and negotiate for permission to install McGrain’s large bronze sculptures there.

The film is directed by Deborah Dickson, whose previous films have been nominated three times for Oscars, and is produced by Muffie Meyer, whose previous directing credits include the original Grey Gardens documentary and several Emmy award-winning documentaries. The score, composed by Grammy-winner Christopher Tin, is a stirring tone-poem for chamber orchestra, evoking the majesty of these flocks of birds, and the pathos of their eventual demise.

Traveling all the way from the tropical swamps of Florida to Martha’s Vineyard to the rocky coasts of Newfoundland over a period of two years, McGrain and Stern scout locations, talk to park rangers, speak at town meetings and battle bureaucracy in their effort to gather support for the project. McGrain’s aim in placing the sculptures is to give presence to the birds where they are now so starkly absent. “These birds are not commonly known,” he says, “and they ought to be, because forgetting is another kind of extinction. It’s such a thorough erasing.”

The Lost Bird Project is a film about public art, extinction and memory. It is an elegy to five extinct North American birds and a thoughtful, moving, sometimes humorous look at the artist and his mission.

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Added Date	Dec 17, 2014 18:35:20
Modified Date	Mar 08, 2016 23:55:27

Notes

ABOUT TODD MCGRAIN

“The project starts with me putting my hands into a bucket of clay and beginning to form out shapes. That heightened attention to form makes it possible for me to be receptive. We’re receptive to the things we open ourselves up to and making sculpture is what opens me up to the world,” says artist Todd McGrain.

McGrain’s passion for form is apparent when he speaks of the physicality of a life of sculpting. “Touch is literally the way we come in contact with the world.” The memorials are not naturalistic works of biological detail, McGrain’s intention is to create shapes that capture the presence of the birds, to make them personal and palpable, to remind us of their absence.

These bronze sculptures are subtle, beautiful, and hopeful reminders. The human scale of each sculpture elicits a physical sympathy. The smooth surface, like a stone polished from touch, conjures the effect of memory and time. I model these gestural forms to contain a taut equilibrium, a balanced pressure from outside and from inside—like a breath held in. As a group they are melancholy, yet affirming. They compel us to recognize the finality of our loss, they ask us not to forget them, and they remind us of our duty to prevent further extinction.

Each of the five memorials have been permanently placed at the specific location directly related to the particular bird’s decline. An additional set of bronze sculptures has been cast and is available for temporary exhibitions.

Todd McGrain has been a sculptor for over 25 years. During this time he has received a number of grants and awards including the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. McGrain has permanent sculpture installations at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York; St. Paul Sculpture Park, St. Paul, Minnesota; Kissimmee Prairie Preserve, Okeechobee, Florida; Brand Park, Elmira, New York; Grange Audubon Center, Columbus Ohio; Kohler Art Center, Kohler, Wisconsin; Museum Civico Zoologia, Rome Italy. For the past ten years, McGrain has been directing his strengths as a sculptor toward the Lost Bird Project. He is the artist-in-residence in the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University.

For more about the artist, please visit his website: toddmcgrain.com