The New York’s High Line, a public park built on a historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side, has announced that Dinosaur, a sculpture by Iván Argote depicting a giant dove, will be the next commission for the High Line Plinth project, promoted and curated by Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, Cecilia Alemani. 
 

Coming as the fourth commission following works by Simone Leigh, Sam Durant, and Pamela Rosenkranz, this hyper-realistic sculpture of a pigeon aims to challenge the symbolic value and grandeur of traditional monuments by humorously canonizing the familiar street bird through a critical approach to dominant narratives. “The name Dinosaur”, explains the Colombian artist, “makes reference to the sculpture’s scale and to the pigeon’s ancestors who millions of years ago dominated the globe[...]Like them, one day we won’t be around any more, but perhaps a remnant of humanity will live on — as pigeons do — in the dark corners and gaps of future worlds”.

Through his work, Argote intends therefore to confront us on our relationship with the natural world and its inhabitants by adopting the pigeon perspective, an anonymous witness to the city’s evolution, reversing the power dynamics between birds and humans to question our own belief system.