Notice too that Graff has morphed the badass bird’s wing into an object resembling a fuel tank that features the number “14,” like the numbers on war planes and racing cars. Graff explains that the numbers on most of his warbirds are “also a reference to annual bird counts, to the taxonomic cataloguing of bird skins in museums, and to military service identification tags, which are useful for identifying the bodies of dead soldiers.” Along with numbers, many of his warbirds are decorated with roundels and other military insignia. Consider (2017) as a vision of what the world could be like after nuclear war. The figure is a cyborg,
half human, and half animal. Unlike the
mythological figure known as the Centaur, this figure, instead of being armed with a bow and arrow, has a rocket launcher mounted on her head and beak, so she is always ready to shoot.