Titian Peale’s Reveal

collage  2021  22″h, 16″w

Titian Peale, had by age of twenty-four established himself as the foremost bird illustrator in the United States prior to John James Audubon’s debut and he revealed that one of Audubon’s illustration of an American condor; Falco washingtoniensis was a fake.   

I collaged the California Condor into a mechanical bird that is partially made of graphs of its genetic components.  The graph used for the tail feathers compares different condor chromosomes and finds there are correlations with locations of sequence variation and amounts of a genetic process called recombination which results in heterozygosity.

The California condor was declared extinct in the wild in 1987 when all 27 remaining individuals were captured as part of a conservation plan.   All the existing birds of this species are descended from those that were rescued. 

The inclusion of chromosomal information refers to the recent discovery of parthenogenesis in three Californa condor chicks, born without any male genetic contribution.  This discovery came at the perfect time for my creation.  

• Diagrams