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Painted on a tenement rooftop in the East Village, Elasmotherium Airlift also appears in the Missing The Megafauna AR tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it is triggered by Tiepolo's Allegory of the Planets and Continents. Here is the accompanying script:
Bound in the talons of the thumping beast, the sky approaches yet yields no foothold. My legs have gone slack, no feeling, no motion, my toes are unrecognizable without the grasses underfoot.They are right you know, my great horn can cure many ills. Its radiance brings order to disharmony. Across the savannah all must give and take care and all understand that the horn is an expression of the animating grasses. Its power is non-transferable. That should be obvious. But home is receding. I no longer hear the cries of my young and must ask, is this the best that can be done?
This work, Elasmotherium Airlift, depicts the black silhouette of a Pleistocene-epoch rhinoceros (Elasmotherium sibiricum) strung upside down by ropes from an airborne helicopter. The reference is to the current conservation practice of airlifting rhinos to safer, less poachable areas of South Africa and Botswana. The method of lifting the massive creature by its ankles ostensibly places less stress on the animal than if it were bouncing around, anesthetized, in a truck.
The black silhouette format used in this work evokes and pays tribute to the Shadowman paintings of Richard Hambleton – iconic presences of absence in the 1980s streets of NYC.
On the tenement building rooftop, the gigantic horn of the elasmotherium transgresses a division between the wall’s vertical plane and the horizontal plane of the roof. To visually align the image across these perpendicular planes requires standing in a precise spot. Following the elasmotherium’s apparent flight path from this view means the helicopter ascends into the same sight corridor in the New York City sky where 3000 people perished in the World Trade Center tragedy. The implication is that the plight of the rhinoceros genus might be analogous to our own and that the decisive component of a preservation-driven airlift isn’t getting aloft, it’s finding a safe place to set down. Hauntingly for the elasmotherium, there was no landing pad, even over the horizon.