Angels of the Empire.  2011-2024. (work in evolution)



"We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise."

-- Joy Harjo. A Map to the Next World. (2000).



...of all the tributaries that run together, which are remembered and which are obscured? Who named them and how did the naming itself do the work of conjuring power? Merely tracing the mutations of the country can’t restore what has been taken or destroyed; time’s river can’t flow backward. Yet the past gives force to present demands. It can burst the channels of monuments and history books..." -- Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins. (2022).


Three colorful yellow and bright red bird specimens, or bird skins of the genus Piranga which includes the Northern Tanagers in the collection of the Southwestern Research Station in Portal, AZ. Copyright Joel Rhymer   ···  
Outside an abandoned brothel in rural Nevada, a large statue of a scantily-clad woman in bright red lingerie and red gloves holds a red light bulb in her outstretched hand.   ···  
Just outside the specimen library of the Southwestern Research Station in Portal, AZ, a bright red male Hepatic Tanager perches among the branches of a green tree.   ···  
As a memorial to victims of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US, a statue of an angel with outstretched wings and downward-spread arms stands next to a "Dead End" road sign on a corner of Bisbee, AZ.   ···  
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