Well, the show will come down this week, but it was a big personal success. I am ready to form my MFA thesis committee, and I got some wonderful feedback on the work. Here is a page full of images from the show, and here is another with photos from the opening.
The Re:forest installation is a representation of my memory, especially as it relates to stories and storytelling. The flat trees in the space are knowledge: unquestioned memories that collectively form the context through which I experience the world. Much like the stage scenery they reference, these trees are in the background, not often paid any attention.
The painting, “Burr Oak (Quercus macrocarpa)”, represents rote memory. It is factual and structured.
The jars on the wall contain imagery-based memories, not fully-formed into cohesive stories. Each jar has a short phrase that triggers a more expansive memory to me. For example, on one I wrote “10-32-26″, which my brother knew right away as the combination to the lock on the garage from the house we grew up in. From that number I see not only the Master lock itself, but the white garage door, the grey shingles on the walls of the garage, my mother’s flower garden and the white fence, then stepping back I see the lilac bush, the tall, sticky, white pines. And beyond imagery, I think of mowing the lawn, shoveling the car out of the snow, the oppresively hot hay loft with sections of the Pinewood Derby track from our Cub Scout troop, and the door that opened out to nothing.
And the most specific memory in the room is the bear on the opposite wall, who visited my brothers and me on a hiking trip in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His ominous presense looks on in my memory, but the temporal and physical distance softens his edges, and he, too, becomes part of the scenery.
On top of this heavy symbolism, I was thinking of all the amazing experiences I have had among trees. The title, Re:forest references email subject lines, indicating the push and pull of technology versus nature. It also suggests the artificiality of my forest, with trees constructed from processed trees, and grass growing in found-jar terrariums.
This work is a step outside of the more character-driven art I have been making up until now. The major-yet-subtle difference with this body of work is that is it motivated by narrative, rather than driven by it. I see it as a context from which I can build my characters’ stories into the future.