This elegiac series of wet plate collodion photograms was inspired by a small songbird I found in front of the entrance of a hospital complex. By all signs, this feathery traveler met its fate in a window collision, joining an endless deluge of avian casualties that perish in this manner, many of which rare and endangered.

My heart simultaneously broke and lept as I spotted the gem-like body resting on the stark pavement. Against odds, it lay unscathed on a busy sidewalk—an exquisite offering (to me, the artist?).

The bird perished by mistaking the mirror-like surface for the sky. Birds symbolize freedom, power, messengers or carriers, transcendence, death, war, wisdom, life and death, and deities. Windows let light in. As if this irony is not enough, the creature perishes by colliding against a structure intended to save human lives. How do we hold these paradoxes? I am interested in art that embraces the complexity of existence.

These photograms emerged as an impulse to search for meaning in the face of absurdity; poetry and beauty, albeit dark and moody, in the face of an inane death – a romantic notion that transcendence through art is possible. The work also seeks to draw attention to a serious ecological issue while holding the complexity of what it means to exist in the Anthropocene age – to acknowledge that I am part of an economic model that is responsible for mass extinctions and environmental havoc while trying to be mindful of my choices.