Chicken Stingel

Installed initially in a chicken coop, these pieces began as a collaboration between Maura and Margaret, a pair of Gallus gallus domesticus—also known as domestic chickens—and Kenny Schachter. Approaching the hens as sentient, living creatures and collaborators rather than fungible foodstuff, a group of micro-sized canvases were coated in edible glue, covered in feed and placed in Maura and Margaret’s coop.

The jumping off point for the works was a series by Rudolf Stingel begun in 2002 on large-scale panels of insulation material (Celotex Tuff-R) affixed to gallery and museum walls where viewers were encouraged to graffiti the spaces via scratching, writing, or otherwise leaving marks on the malleable surfaces. A decade later, in 2012, the artist readdressed the brittle pieces by casting them in electroformed copper, plated in nickel and gold.