Opening Tumbuh Rimpang
November 29, 2024
Albatross
Todd mcmillan
Exhibition
Repurposing: Paradise
Artist
Todd mcmillan
Written by
Krisna Sudharma
Albatross thrusts us into a broader societal introspection, compelling us to examine the paradoxes of our own making
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In November 2011 McMillan participated in an observational voyage to Pedra Branco, an island off the South Coast of Tasmania. Using a 16mm camera, he filmed the rare and endangered Shy Albatross in its natural environment. Within the philosophical framework of Romanticism, the albatross is a poetic symbol of the human soul. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the death of an albatross is a portent of death for those who killed it. McMillan explores this symbolic bird in its natural environment to show the beauty and strangeness of both the bird and its rugged habitat. The resulting work seeks to poetically document a romantic and melancholic symbol of impending doom on the literal precipice of its own demise – the significance of the project being the vulnerable status of the Shy Albatross.
Albatross thrusts us into a broader societal introspection, compelling us to examine the paradoxes of our own making. How do we reconcile the creation of a man-made paradise with the resultant unrecognizable transformations in our natural world? In what ways are we, both creators and destroyers, accountable for the familiar turned alien in our pursuit of paradise?
Just as McMillan’s work oscillates between the absence and presence of humanity in its depiction of landscapes, it also challenges us to consider our place and our impact within these ecosystems. His film is not merely a rebuke but a call to mindfulness concerning the delicate balance of our environmental engagements and the poetic yet precarious existence of species such as the Shy Albatross.
This body of work emerges as a critical component within the broader dialogue of the Repurposing: Paradise exhibition. It prompts introspection about our alarmingly delayed recognition and action towards endangered species and ecological crises. It raises pertinent questions: Why is it that only in the face of imminent extinction and danger do we start to pay attention? What occurs when our comfort blinds us to the urgency of vocal advocacy, often when it is already too late? At the heart of this interrogation lies the albatross, a poetic symbol of the human soul, shaping an ideal paradise that is intricately crafted by humans yet has become unrecognizably alien from what was originally conceived and perceived by its creators.
