You Must Carry Me Now
2014
14 archival photographs on rag paper, mounted on Kapa, custom-made shelves and benches with accompanying bookwork inset
You Must Carry Me Now is a suite of fourteen photographs the artists made of the preserved cadavers of Californian condors, a threatened species they worked with in Grand Canyon, Arizona. The entire species was saved from extinction in 1987 and is maintained on a human life-support system that closely monitors and treats the birds all year round for the otherwise fatal effects of lead-poisoning. As scavengers, the birds feed from discarded gut piles of hunted game. The viscera are contaminated by the fragmentation of the hunters’ lead bullets, causing crop stasis and eventual starvation in the condors. So the two cultures of conservation and hunting meet and compete in sustained tension, both within the crop and over the fate of this species.