When you walk into the second-floor gallery space of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum you might be surprised to see Art Fox’s photographs of birds literally hovering off the wall. For the exhibition “Broken Journey,” instead of being displayed in a standard gallery presentation—where the artworks are positioned flush against the wall—15 of Fox’s images are hung with wire to appear as if they are floating. The birds, all dead, are photographed against blurry backgrounds—the wings of some are bent; others are extended, as if in motion. Even though the show is meant to convey flight, the paradox is that the subjects are incapable of ever flying again.
Often, the birds’ deaths are due to indirect human intervention, whether it’s smacking into the windows of a house or skyscraper, or even being attacked by a house cat. Steven Sullivan, senior curator of urban ecology at the Nature Museum, estimated that up to 1 billion birds die each year from flying into buildings, and an additional 100 million or so perish due to colliding with communication towers, power distribution lines, and other seemingly innocuous structures. “Cities are intrinsic death traps for birds, and wildlife in general,” Sullivan said. “But we as Chicagoans want to mitigate that problem.”
