Sound Installation (at American Academy of Arts and Letters): Aviary is a site-specific sound installation that repurposes Audubon Society field recordings of birds common to the land into a forty-minute composition that slowly fades from recent recordings of live birds to recordings of calls of extinct and endangered species made with sculptural instruments designed by Chacon. Housed in the neoclassical North Gallery of the Arts and Letters campus in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of New York City, the gallery’s high glass ceiling and imported Spanish tiles produce an extraordinarily long reverberation, creating a uniquely reflective sonic space for the intersection of present sounds with an imagined or desired past.
The work directly confronts the “ownership” of the land upon which the museum now sits by French-American ornithologist James Audubon, after whom the society was named, and the historical legacy of displacement in the region of Native species and peoples, as well as the legacy of the land itself.