Honeycreeper, 2022
Leaves, photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel
84 x 60 in.
213.4 x 152.4 cm
213.4 x 152.4 cm
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Fred Tomaselli’s most recent resin encapsulated collage work, 'Honeycreeper', 2022, depicts a Mamo Honeycreeper, now extinct following the European colonization of Hawaii. Represented ominously white-eyed, the imposing, fiercely hook-beaked bird...
Fred Tomaselli’s most recent resin encapsulated collage work, "Honeycreeper", 2022, depicts a Mamo Honeycreeper, now extinct following the European colonization of Hawaii. Represented ominously white-eyed, the imposing, fiercely hook-beaked bird rests on a flowering branch, which it tightly clutches with threateningly sharp talons. Spiraling upwards from the bird is a burst of collaged newsprint pinwheels that germinate across the picture plane in mesmerizing and hallucinatory patterns, like a blooming bouquet or a mutating virus–the idyll of nature pierced by the man-made world.
Hawaiian Honeycreepers descended from finches and once totaled 51 sub-species. Contemporaneously, more than half of these nectar-eating species are now extinct due to human impact. For Tomaselli, making the Mamo Honeycreeper visible in his work is a way to see the unseeable, and acknowledge the Holocene Extinction and humanity's precarious relationship with nature.
Hawaiian Honeycreepers descended from finches and once totaled 51 sub-species. Contemporaneously, more than half of these nectar-eating species are now extinct due to human impact. For Tomaselli, making the Mamo Honeycreeper visible in his work is a way to see the unseeable, and acknowledge the Holocene Extinction and humanity's precarious relationship with nature.