Installation at FEED Media Art Center, Erie PA December 2023

Lately, It’s Late, 2023

Cast birds in hydrocal plaster (hand modeled)

Projected, looped video (9:26 minutes) 

approx. 10 ft in diameter x 7 in.

Lately, It’s Late marks a decisive shift in a body of work dedicated to the metaphorical resonance of birds. Luchetti’s installation draws together two strategies already well-established in her work: honoring the spirit and life of specific birds in solemn portraits of species facing extinction, and incorporating video to invoke humans’ communion and compromise of the natural world. Earlier works separate sculptural installation and video projection. By contrast, Luchetti’s avian circle superimposes footage of a starling murmuration, or swarming, on the still plaster-cast bodies of multiple bird species. The effect is to re-animate them. While decorative tendencies persist in the installation’s floral pattern, Lately, It’s Late is devoid of color, signaling a shift from the more sensuous character of earlier sculptures and drawings towards a more conceptual approach. In renouncing the vivid color palette and specific, portrait-like renderings of birds, Luchetti seeks to forge an indelible link between the specimen and broader systemic connections: How might starling murmuration provoke questions about collective behaviors—and serve as a sympathetic chord to human experience?

-CHW

Birdbath, 2020

Found birdbath

Projected, looped video (1:19 minutes) of the bodies of jets flying over