Tammy McGrath's Adagio in G Minor: A Lullaby

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“Gone the way of the dodo” is an all-too-common lament, uttered when yet another species joins the growing list of recent extinctions. In Tammy McGrath’s exhibition, Adagio in G Minor: A Lullaby, at Calgary’s New Gallery until June 24, a fictional dodo plays a central role in an eloquent yet unsettling tale about truth, knowledge and history. The installation includes a 30-foot paper scroll listing every censored or banned book the artist has noted to date. This perpetual list has been meticulously recorded using an antique typewriter smattered with broken keys, resulting in the random censoring of words as the text is typed. Accompanying these objects is an audio piece infusing the space with the melodic sound of Calgary artist and musician Rita McKeough reciting McGrath’s fictional account of the enigmatic dodo devouring books.

“Consuming their pages one by one, she collected the books of the world. In the beginning, she did not worry about her body running out of room. Her appetite was insatiable – a constant dull hunger. Sometimes she let the words dissolve off the pages, roll around her pointed tongue and clink against her beak. Many sentences were difficult to swallow.”

McGrath, a Calgary-based artist, began the work during a 2014 residency with the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation, when she explored correlations between the extinction of the dodo and its deaccession from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 1775. Her explorations have resulted in an intricately composed installation that links ecological extinction with censorship and the rewriting of history.

The history of the dodo, a flightless bird found only on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, is a prickly one, riddled with fictional images and mischaracterizations. The three-foot tall bird became extinct in the 1600s, within 90 years of Dutch colonization of the previously uninhabited island.

Safeguarding native animals and plants is a key function of an ecologically protected area. However, that isn’t its only role. The species in a given area are only one component of a larger ecosystem. McGrath’s exhibition draws a parallel to art and culture as a protected area where each work is a component of a larger narrative (or ecosystem) vulnerable to hostile forces.

Donning a 30-foot long feathered cape, the artist performs the dodo in a gesture that tries to protect the literary works while exposing an exhaustive list of treacherous acts used to snuff them out. Seated on a high wooden chair, the dodo transcribes from a stack of papers (ripped into pieces on completion) listing censored works using a heavy black typewriter mounted on a wooden table. McGrath replicated the darkly stained table from Caravaggio’s painting, Saint Jerome Writing. In the image, Saint Jerome – the patron saint of translators, librarians and encyclopedists – reads intently as his outstretched arm rests on a book with quill in hand.

A disturbing mix of quiet resistance and muted futility permeates McGrath’s exhibition. The combination of the quilled cape, throne-like chair and soft scrolling text transforms the seated dodo into a wizened creature that bears witness to the destructive nature of humans to censor or eliminate. The scholarly tone of the installation captures the human tendency to record history through oral or written stories, while its political undertone reminds us that our natural and cultural histories are perpetually vulnerable to eradication.

Standing amongst the undulating patterns of downy duck and moulted turkey feathers, listening to the repetitive clicking of typewriter keys and the lamenting lullaby of an extinct dodo, the viewer is caught in a maelstrom of auditory, textual and visual futility. The piece gently, yet persuasively, reminds us that words have the power to rewrite or erase histories, offend the pious and impassion the masses to resist.

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The New Gallery

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