Some Words on a Bird. Before the word arrived, the Spirit of the Land had a voice, of color, of cackle, of hoots and whistles, and it filled the forests. Hello my name is Mel Chen. I'm an artist. According to this document, I was born in Houston, Texas. I live now in the mountains of western North Carolina. After I looked at the Webster’s Third International Dictionary. I was looking through it and I found a tiny illustration of this parakeet. I think it was about this big. A parakeet. I steeped the whole thick volume in wax until it was saturated with wax, and I lifted it out and let it freeze, then I slowly began to carve away this image. We don't have the words really to describe extinction. Because what can you say? You're part of an enterprise that destroyed life on Earth. And the carving away of words and pages began like a meditation on what I am about, as a person living in this world. The humor that might be found in it — I was born in the ’50s, so a child of the ’60s … There was a surfer song … It's a very catchy, wild tune. So there is humor. You take that and you just switch it around, so there’s no humor. It’s about human experience. These works are only part of the bigger idea, that I was invited to participate in Spirit in the Land. I think what I was trying to do at least is to figure out which spirit of the land rules over all of us, especially myself. Because you can't excuse yourself from everything that has happened. … But I do remember in my youth reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and even though my parents are immigrants from China I remember a tremendous sense of loss and guilt and that feeling as a kind of spirit that has gone that no longer exists amongst us, or it's still here but not voiced with any kind of authority. Even thinking about what the Spirit in the Land means … I think Nietzsche reapproximates it, but it's how the unexamined life is not worth living. But I feel the capacity to examine one's life is constantly stripped away, actually and, if anything, art can be part of that which re-catalyzes or reanimates that desire to know. I am Amelia Everett. I have been working for Mel for four years. This piece Never Forever, I don’t think it was even called that, had been around for quite a while in my mind. But when I heard you are a weaver, I know, that is the most exciting important moment. When you think of a piece you don't know how to do something and you're constantly dreaming and hoping for the right person to show up so thank you, thank you for your expertise and look at the stuff you’re doing. I didn't want to make something based on the plumage exactly but it would have more information like the color and sometimes its diet. This is the Carolina Parakeet. The Cabinets of Conuropsis carolinensis. Audubon’s graphical illustrations, the palette for woven color, a special cocklebur diet, yields patterns stretched as grills over acoustic speakers, set in shard-shaped cabinets. Consider them coffins, chunks of the large diamond, lie on the floor resonating, through the warp and wefted colors, a species’ imagined esprit de corps. Softly audible, reconstituted dispirited squawks, as bytes transmit through wires, technological approximation of mating calls. With none living to deliver, and none living to respond.