Canaries, (2026)
Canaries, 2026. Live canaries, full-spectrum UV light, bird food, water, pickaxes, coal, charcoal
243.8 × 121.9 × 121.9 cm | 96 × 48 × 48 inches
The Ultimate Zone of Unspeakable Horror was an exhibition of works by students and teachers, organized by students and installed in the sublevel of the California Institute of the Arts. The works were presented in the video department’s studios and equipment cages. These rooms are not exhibition spaces. They are where the school keeps its equipment -the cameras, lights, and spaces that students check out, use, and return.
The show’s title is a quotation. Mike Kelley, who received his MFA from C.I.A. in 1978, spent a significant part of his practice rebuilding his education from memory. Educational Complex (1995) is a tabletop model of every school he attended and the house he grew up in, joined into one campus with blanks wherever his memory failed. By his own account he could not remember most of it. He titled his essay on the work “Architectural Non-Memory Replaced with Psychic Reality,” a joke at the expense of a decade convinced that anything forgotten must be hiding a trauma. In 1998 he rebuilt the sublevel of C.I.A., its unremembered rooms lined with pink crystal resin. Writing about the sublevel, he calls one spot in it “the ultimate zone of unspeakable horror.” The organizers did not only name the show after Kelley’s sublevel -they presented it inside of it.
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The sublevel is where, buried, some of C.I.A.’s most arresting rumors emerge and persist, unwritten. The school was founded by Walt and Roy Disney, but Walt died in December 1966, before the completed Valencia campus opened. The record says he was cremated two days later and remains at Forest Lawn. The rumor says he is here, below C.I.A., frozen, waiting. In the opening room of the exhibition my piece stood beside Scott Benzel’s V.I.T.R.I.O.L., a cryonic head of Walt Disney under a bell jar, the object of a secret sublevel image that generations of students have described and none have seen. Benzel’s title is understood as visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone. Earlier in this yearbook I argued that the mythology of C.I.A. rests on the absence of its archive and surveillance. A rumor needs a room with no cameras in it. The sublevel is that room and more, dark, and as a result limitless in the edges of one’s perception and understanding.
I believe a school can be interpreted as a place that mines information. This one also has an actual underground. The photography department darkrooms are down there, and for two years that is where I worked, down the stairs, through the light trap, into total darkness to make the work and carry it back up. Understood that way, the equipment cages are not storage. They are where the tools are kept between shifts, checked out, used, and returned.
So for my work I filled an equipment cage inside the exhibition space with tools. I collected eight pickaxes secondhand off Facebook Marketplace, picking them up one and two at a time from across Los Angeles. They came already worn. I covered them in coal and charcoal until they were darkened and leaned them inside the cage.
Inside the cage, I then placed two live canaries. I gave them food and water, and hung a full-spectrum light overhead. I named one bird John and the other Mike, after John Baldessari and Mike Kelley. Baldessari taught here. Kelley was his student. The light was the only sun they had. Everything else was already there. The school built these cages to protect equipment. I only changed what was kept in them. During the exhibition the birds moved freely inside the cage, perching on the tools.
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The practice the piece rests on began with a disaster. After an explosion killed fifty-seven men underground at the Tylorstown colliery in 1896, the physiologist John Scott Haldane found that most of them had not been killed by the blast but by the carbon monoxide that followed it, a gas with no color and no smell. His report to the Home Secretary proposed a warning system, a small animal that breathes faster than we do and will encounter the poison first. A bird turned out to be nearly perfect for the use. Air moves through a bird both on the inhale and on the exhale. Whatever is in the mine is in the bird sooner. When the canary swayed on its perch, the miners knew to evacuate. Later the miners carried resuscitation cages, sealed metal and glass with a small oxygen cylinder, so a collapsed bird could be shut in and revived.
In 1926 the Dundee Courier reported that wild redpolls were the more reliable bird underground, being “more active, and more sensitive to the effects of gas than cage-bred birds.” The bird raised in a cage is worse at noticing danger than the bird that was caught. However, many miners resisted this change and kept using their canaries.
Miners saw the canaries as their peers and took great care of them. Miners whistled to their canaries, coaxed them, talked to them, kept them as pets, and carried them like colleagues. The same 1926 article that preferred the redpolls objected to the entire practice on grounds that had nothing to do with accuracy: “To see them go down on what is at present a necessary mission of mercy is pathetic, for the dark and gloomy pits are the very antithesis of the natural haunts of the joyous sun-loving ‘children of the air.’”
Children of the air, taken into the ground.
Britain legislated the birds out of the mines and replaced them with electronic detectors, and the miners grieved. The detector was more accurate and no one loved it.
An electronic detector speaks only when the air is already bad. A canary sings the whole shift. The warning sign the miners knew to watch for was the sway, not the silence, so what follows is my understanding and not theirs -the canaries’ song carried the opposite information, still safe, still here. The canary did not sound the alarm. The canary’s song was a continuous sound of its absence.
In 1978 at C.I.A. Mike Kelley presented self-constructed birdhouses as his thesis. They were a series of impossible birdhouses, eight of them painted white, along with a chicken brooder, each one built to a how-to manual he wrote himself in parody of the ones sold in hardware stores, and each one shown with a drawing of its own title. Gothic Birdhouse stacks nine roofs one above the other. Catholic Birdhouse has two entrance holes, a small scratched one marked THE HARD ROAD and a larger one marked THE EASY ROAD.Birdhouse for a Bird That Is Near and a Bird That Is Far is two square megaphones joined at their wide ends, a house for one bird in two places at once. They fail first as birdhouses. That is what they are for.
Kelley’s birdhouses were, as far as I’m aware, never occupied by birds. They existed as homes for birds that do not and cannot exist. Forty-eight years later under the same roof, under the same ground, Canaries looked to realize his thesis and bring real living birds into an uninhabitable hole in Kelley’s mind -The Ultimate Zone of Unspeakable Horror.
Canaries also acknowledges the earlier ecological and institutional works of Hans Haacke. In 1972 he installed Rhinewater Purification Plant at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. He took the wastewater the town’s sewage plant was discharging into the Rhine, water the city classified as treated, ran it through his own settling tanks and filters, and fed the cleaned output into a tank of goldfish. The accusation is the machine itself. The city called the water treated, and Haacke had to treat it again, in a gallery, with every stage of the process left visible. The fish came at the end of it. Their job was to certify the result. Alive, they showed his filtration had worked. What I took from Haacke is the job the animal is given. His fish were asked to show that something was now safe. Mine were asked to show that something was not. Same instrument, opposite directions, and it is worth noticing which of the two an audience can stand to look at.
Nothing was wrong with the air in the sublevel. The birds were never in danger and were never going to be. The danger this piece points at is not one a bird can smell.
This danger is impending. Canaries is to be understood as a predictive image, composed around the potential futures for students and faculty at C.I.A.
The canary in the coal mine survives as an image -the oldest predictive image I know. Almost no one who says the phrase has seen the bird, and everyone who hears it sees one. This is the kind of image this book has been about from its first page: one that requires no camera, no shutter, and no author standing behind a lens. I made no photograph here. I built the conditions of an image everyone already carries and installed it, alive, inside an institution that is not itself stable or fixed, nor one that should ever be.
C.I.A. in 2026 is a school whose air is changing. In April 2025 it announced the CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology, five years of funding from the CHANEL Culture Fund, organized around artificial intelligence and machine learning. Three months later it laid off nine staff. By August it had reported a projected $15M deficit, and of the fifty to sixty people offered voluntary separation packages, thirty-two had taken them, twenty-two of those faculty. Enrollment is down about twelve percent from where it was before the pandemic. The galleries and studios of C.I.A. have cracked walls. A restricted gift cannot be turned into salaries. What it can show is what the school is still able to raise money for, and what it has decided it cannot afford.
Throughout the exhibition the student organizers kept watch for Campus Safety, and each time a guard passed, someone quietly closed the door of the room. A work about the school’s watchfulness was protected the way this school has always been protected -by people, watching.
I bought the canaries for the show. When it came down I took them home, and I still keep them. John and Mike are alive.
This is the final work in this book, made in the part of the school the school prefers to forget, in the last room the cameras have not reached. It is the last of the anticipatory aesthetics this book collects, the climate work and the surveillance work and this one all attending to a harm before it arrives. I was trained as a photographer and I am resisting the noun. What changed in these two years was my understanding of imagery. The work is a photograph in every sense but the technical one.
The song is not the alarm. The silence is.
The show’s title is a quotation. Mike Kelley, who received his MFA from C.I.A. in 1978, spent a significant part of his practice rebuilding his education from memory. Educational Complex (1995) is a tabletop model of every school he attended and the house he grew up in, joined into one campus with blanks wherever his memory failed. By his own account he could not remember most of it. He titled his essay on the work “Architectural Non-Memory Replaced with Psychic Reality,” a joke at the expense of a decade convinced that anything forgotten must be hiding a trauma. In 1998 he rebuilt the sublevel of C.I.A., its unremembered rooms lined with pink crystal resin. Writing about the sublevel, he calls one spot in it “the ultimate zone of unspeakable horror.” The organizers did not only name the show after Kelley’s sublevel -they presented it inside of it.
I believe a school can be interpreted as a place that mines information. This one also has an actual underground. The photography department darkrooms are down there, and for two years that is where I worked, down the stairs, through the light trap, into total darkness to make the work and carry it back up. Understood that way, the equipment cages are not storage. They are where the tools are kept between shifts, checked out, used, and returned.
So for my work I filled an equipment cage inside the exhibition space with tools. I collected eight pickaxes secondhand off Facebook Marketplace, picking them up one and two at a time from across Los Angeles. They came already worn. I covered them in coal and charcoal until they were darkened and leaned them inside the cage.
Inside the cage, I then placed two live canaries. I gave them food and water, and hung a full-spectrum light overhead. I named one bird John and the other Mike, after John Baldessari and Mike Kelley. Baldessari taught here. Kelley was his student. The light was the only sun they had. Everything else was already there. The school built these cages to protect equipment. I only changed what was kept in them. During the exhibition the birds moved freely inside the cage, perching on the tools.
In 1926 the Dundee Courier reported that wild redpolls were the more reliable bird underground, being “more active, and more sensitive to the effects of gas than cage-bred birds.” The bird raised in a cage is worse at noticing danger than the bird that was caught. However, many miners resisted this change and kept using their canaries.
Miners saw the canaries as their peers and took great care of them. Miners whistled to their canaries, coaxed them, talked to them, kept them as pets, and carried them like colleagues. The same 1926 article that preferred the redpolls objected to the entire practice on grounds that had nothing to do with accuracy: “To see them go down on what is at present a necessary mission of mercy is pathetic, for the dark and gloomy pits are the very antithesis of the natural haunts of the joyous sun-loving ‘children of the air.’”
Children of the air, taken into the ground.
Britain legislated the birds out of the mines and replaced them with electronic detectors, and the miners grieved. The detector was more accurate and no one loved it.
An electronic detector speaks only when the air is already bad. A canary sings the whole shift. The warning sign the miners knew to watch for was the sway, not the silence, so what follows is my understanding and not theirs -the canaries’ song carried the opposite information, still safe, still here. The canary did not sound the alarm. The canary’s song was a continuous sound of its absence.
In 1978 at C.I.A. Mike Kelley presented self-constructed birdhouses as his thesis. They were a series of impossible birdhouses, eight of them painted white, along with a chicken brooder, each one built to a how-to manual he wrote himself in parody of the ones sold in hardware stores, and each one shown with a drawing of its own title. Gothic Birdhouse stacks nine roofs one above the other. Catholic Birdhouse has two entrance holes, a small scratched one marked THE HARD ROAD and a larger one marked THE EASY ROAD.Birdhouse for a Bird That Is Near and a Bird That Is Far is two square megaphones joined at their wide ends, a house for one bird in two places at once. They fail first as birdhouses. That is what they are for.
Kelley’s birdhouses were, as far as I’m aware, never occupied by birds. They existed as homes for birds that do not and cannot exist. Forty-eight years later under the same roof, under the same ground, Canaries looked to realize his thesis and bring real living birds into an uninhabitable hole in Kelley’s mind -The Ultimate Zone of Unspeakable Horror.
Canaries also acknowledges the earlier ecological and institutional works of Hans Haacke. In 1972 he installed Rhinewater Purification Plant at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. He took the wastewater the town’s sewage plant was discharging into the Rhine, water the city classified as treated, ran it through his own settling tanks and filters, and fed the cleaned output into a tank of goldfish. The accusation is the machine itself. The city called the water treated, and Haacke had to treat it again, in a gallery, with every stage of the process left visible. The fish came at the end of it. Their job was to certify the result. Alive, they showed his filtration had worked. What I took from Haacke is the job the animal is given. His fish were asked to show that something was now safe. Mine were asked to show that something was not. Same instrument, opposite directions, and it is worth noticing which of the two an audience can stand to look at.
Nothing was wrong with the air in the sublevel. The birds were never in danger and were never going to be. The danger this piece points at is not one a bird can smell.
This danger is impending. Canaries is to be understood as a predictive image, composed around the potential futures for students and faculty at C.I.A.
The canary in the coal mine survives as an image -the oldest predictive image I know. Almost no one who says the phrase has seen the bird, and everyone who hears it sees one. This is the kind of image this book has been about from its first page: one that requires no camera, no shutter, and no author standing behind a lens. I made no photograph here. I built the conditions of an image everyone already carries and installed it, alive, inside an institution that is not itself stable or fixed, nor one that should ever be.
C.I.A. in 2026 is a school whose air is changing. In April 2025 it announced the CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology, five years of funding from the CHANEL Culture Fund, organized around artificial intelligence and machine learning. Three months later it laid off nine staff. By August it had reported a projected $15M deficit, and of the fifty to sixty people offered voluntary separation packages, thirty-two had taken them, twenty-two of those faculty. Enrollment is down about twelve percent from where it was before the pandemic. The galleries and studios of C.I.A. have cracked walls. A restricted gift cannot be turned into salaries. What it can show is what the school is still able to raise money for, and what it has decided it cannot afford.
Throughout the exhibition the student organizers kept watch for Campus Safety, and each time a guard passed, someone quietly closed the door of the room. A work about the school’s watchfulness was protected the way this school has always been protected -by people, watching.
I bought the canaries for the show. When it came down I took them home, and I still keep them. John and Mike are alive.
This is the final work in this book, made in the part of the school the school prefers to forget, in the last room the cameras have not reached. It is the last of the anticipatory aesthetics this book collects, the climate work and the surveillance work and this one all attending to a harm before it arrives. I was trained as a photographer and I am resisting the noun. What changed in these two years was my understanding of imagery. The work is a photograph in every sense but the technical one.
The song is not the alarm. The silence is.