The nine-foot armature of Copper and Red Thunderbird is a spray-painted ladder. Flashes of copper and red are consistent in the palette of the installation. The central repeating pattern in the installation is a quote from a Norval Morrisseau Thunderbird painting. I used the positive and negative space of the wingspan of one of his compositions to create a laser cut-out used in the installation, and the four suspended paintings.

Laser cutting has been a cornerstone of my practice since 2012 when I did a residency at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). I was one of the first in the world to engage these technologies as they were becoming available on the commercial market, and RMIT had one. I was assigned a team that scrutinized my materials and taught me how to use the machine, and I have been pushing these experiments ever since. - Jason Baerg