The New York Times reported last week that, in Ukraine, an inexpensive military drone punched a hole in Chernobyl’s outer steel shell and caused a fire. Engineers aren’t sure how to repair it, given the dangers of working at the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
The story is real, but it also suggests the beginning of a sci-fi novel or a radioactive monster movie — or an origin story for the world that Québec artist Stéphanie Morissette has created with “Speculative Future,” her exhibition currently on view at BCA Center in Burlington.
The show presents sculptures of imaginary hybrid bird-drone creatures, all black, featuring propellers in different shapes and configurations. “Bird/Drone” has an X-shaped body and cut paper feathers curling up from its underside in a reversal of how wings usually work. It stands on delicate metal bird legs with sharp talons. One face of its square, blocky torso is covered in yellow glass eyes.
“I play with darkness and hope — I think it is kind of a poetry.” Stéphanie Morissette
Nearby, smaller specimens sprout propellers from every direction. One looks like a pom-pom, with feathers and mechanical parts all trying to occupy the same space and no visible head. Another rests on folding legs, its horizontal body spread out like a little four-winged plane, with a single red eye almost covered by paper feathers. Even minimal interventions by the artist, such as adding bird feet, make the drones zoomorphic, recasting existing screw holes or plastic vents as eyes and mouths.
On the walls, Morissette has displayed 36-by-26-inch digital prints of drawings. The first of these appears as a page in a giant book, similar in format to John James Audubon’s Birds of America. A title page identifies these images as belonging to “Birds of Prey.”
Each drawing depicts a different kind of drone, often flying over a wrecked, rubble-strewn landscape. Some of these drones have attacked actual birds — eagles, a great blue heron — which lie dead at the base of their landing gear. Many fly in what seem to be swarms or flocks. The images are captioned with collective nouns — “A Descent of Reapers,” “A Banditry of Valkyries,” “A Murder of Drones.”
The drawings reference Audubon’s detailed etchings without resembling them. Instead, they’re cartoony, their inked black outlines filled in with watercolor marker. It’s as though the naturalist’s penchant for encyclopedic avian documentation has manifested itself in that one kid in every fifth-grade class who’s obsessed with drawing fighter jets.
In an artist talk at BCA Center, Morissette described her style as “childish.” “You bring people closer when you have this aesthetic,” she said. “Because they’re closer to the object, then they can reflect on the concept. It’s a way to welcome people in[to] your idea.”
That idea and the research involved in executing it are the foundation of Morissette’s work, more than any single craft or medium. Though she said she doesn’t read much science fiction, the exhibition’s loose collection of narrative parts builds a world similar to those of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake — landscapes where mutant species have taken off and developed their own spooky, threatening intelligences.
In Morissette’s world, scientists try to perfect a drone-bird, through much trial and error. “There will be many specimens, like impossible birds or impossible drones,” she said at the talk. But after a while, “they escape the lab. They have their own life, and they rule the world, and then, like dinosaurs, at some point there’s an extinction.” Later, astronaut paleontologists find remnants of the drone-birds and try to piece together the story, much as the viewer does.
The artist has included a vitrine of “fossils” — ceramic sculptures replicating the drones as they would appear fossilized. The most convincing of these are small shards of clay imprinted with feathers and propellers. Others seem more like half-remembered descriptions of the creatures, made with a similar naïve hand to the drawings.
From another point on the timeline, Morissette presents 3D-printed resin models of bird-drone anatomy. “Future Sentinel Drone” is a cross section made by combining an actual model of a present-day Sentinel drone (available online) with a bone structure based on a manta ray’s. Likewise, “Future Military Blackbird Jet” adds avian bone structures to the model of an aircraft (really called, to Morissette’s delight, Blackbird). Morissette imagined these as educational models, she said, like the plastic skeletons found in biology classrooms.
The artist explained that she also works in virtual reality and installation, where the participants’ movement through space is key. For “Speculative Future,” she said, “I was trying to move in time, going back and forth: Time is not just a horizontal line. Time can be a map with different positions, and you can make your own parcours [pathways].”
Futuristic as it is, the work is grounded in current science and warfare. Morissette said she had the wars in Ukraine and Gaza specifically in mind; many of the images of destroyed buildings, rubble and unexploded ordnance in the “Birds of Prey” series are drawn directly from news photos.
Those clear allusions create tension between reality and fantasy, serious concerns and dark humor. When people can laugh a little at the goofiness of some pieces, Morissette said, the work becomes more accessible — just as artists such as Art Spiegelman have used comics to tackle difficult subjects. She also said it’s important to her to put herself in others’ shoes, whether those of scientists, future archaeologists or the bird-drones themselves. That shift of perspective helps her, as well as viewers, think differently about the issues her work raises.
While many viewers may search for a more direct explanation of what they’re looking at, they should trust Morissette’s impulse not to be didactic. “Speculative Future” presents fragments, suggesting a story while leaving ample room for interpretation and revision — and for other possible futures.
“I play with darkness and hope — I think it is kind of a poetry,” the artist said. “It’s like playing with words, but I’m playing with feathers.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ornithology of the Apocalypse | Stéphanie Morissette’s hybrid creatures take off at BCA Center”
This article appears in The Money & Retirement Issue 2025.
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