Séance

Published Dec. 9, 2009 at 9:55 p.m.
Rachel Berwick conjures ghost birds in Zugunruhe...
...Rachel Berwick's art is concerned with conjuring ghosts — in particular the spirits of creatures or peoples near extinction or already died out...

POSSESSED? A glass globe in Zugunruhe.

Rachel Berwick's art is concerned with conjuring ghosts — in particular the spirits of creatures or peoples near extinction or already died out. Her conceptual art installations — like her new piece Zugunruhe at Brown University's Bell Gallery (64 College Street, Providence, through February 14) — hover somewhere between monument and séance and Jurassic Park-style resurrections of the disappeared.

"There's a common theme that runs through all of my work," Berwick tells me, "and it is working primarily with the notion of loss and our desire to recover that which is lost. And then following that through, the impossibility of that, but the importance of the attempt to recover even in the case of probable failure."

In one past work, Berwick, who chairs RISD's glass department and resides in Killingworth, Connecticut, has produced 3D renderings of a Tasmanian tiger based on a brief film of one of the critters before the species went extinct. Another time, she taught parrots the language of an extinct Venezuelan native people, a language said to have only survived to be recorded by a German naturalist in 1799 because when a neighboring tribe's raid wiped out its last human speakers, the attackers took their victims' parrots, which remembered their language.

Zugunruhe is one of the finest things she has done. It picks up on themes she first addressed in A Vanishing: Martha (2003-05), which was a sort of 3D grid of passenger pigeons cast in orange copal. It represented the species' reduction — particularly by human hunting — down to one bird, Martha, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

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