Jamison “Chas” Banks, Coming Extinctions: Davy Crocket and Gastornis

In his serigraph Coming Extinctions (Davy Crockett with a Diatryma), Jamison “Chas” Banks examines humanity’s role in the current, human-driven mass extinction. The frontiersman and politician Davy Crockett, rendered here through Disney’s popularized imagery, faces off against the Paleocene terror bird Diatryma in a pointed critique of how colonial narratives sanitize violence through entertainment, rendering domination heroic and inevitable. As part of the larger Eradication Methods Laboratory project, the work situates the present sixth mass extinction within a longer history of colonial conquest, in which animal species are systematically “invisibled” through the Disney-fication of expansion and settlement. Ecological devastation is recast as adventure, collapsing the logics of hunting, warfare, and spectacle into a single visual field.