Category: Forest: Eden to Apocalypse

In Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison’s exhibition and book, The Architect’s Brother, the artists create an imaginary dystopia in which a sole survivor tries to mend a broken earth. In sepia-toned multi-media photographs, they envision the attempts of a figure in an ill-fitting black suit to perform such tasks as cleaning clouds, creating machines to listen to the earth, and transcribing the stories of trees. Creating visual parables about the possibility of healing the planet, the ParkeHarrisons invent a variety of absurd solutions to their bleak scenes of post-apocalyptic environmental devastation.

As the artists observe on their website, “We create works in response to the ever-bleakening relationship linking humans, technology, and nature. These works feature an ambiguous narrative that offers insight into the dilemma posed by science and technology’s failed promise to fix our problems….”[footnote]Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, “Artist Statement,” http://www.parkeharrison.com/statement. Accessed March 20, 2017.[/footnote]

In Tree Sonata, from the subset, Earth Elegies, a figure perches on a wooden stand to serenade dead trees with a clunky, oversized stringed instrument. Wearing a straw cornucopia hat, the musician invokes themes of bounty and harvest in this bleak setting. With a style recalling the look of nineteenth-century photographs by such figures as Timothy O’Sullivan, the ParkeHarrisons use multiple paper negatives, drawing, painting, collage elements, and composite printing to create their final works.

Land and Lens guest curator Kirsten Hoving interviewed the artists about their work:

The bristlecone pine trees of the White Mountains of California are believed to be some of the world’s oldest living organisms, with lifespans of some trees estimated at 5000 years or more. Able to thrive in harsh conditions, the trees grow very slowly, making their wood very dense and resistant to insects and rot. Growing at high elevations just below the tree line, wind, rain, and freezing erode the trees into distinctive twisted shapes. The tree is important in the science of dendrochronology, where tree rings are compared to changes in environmental conditions over long periods of time.

By viewing a tree up close, Brett Weston finds an abstract design in its twisted form. Unlike Weston’s photographs of clouds, which feature frozen glimpses of constantly-changing forms, his bristlecone pine photograph celebrates longevity.

Andi Lloyd, Vice-President for Academic Affairs/Dean of the Faculty and Stewart Professor of Biology shares her knowledge about the bristlecone pine:

For more than three decades, identical twins Mike and Doug Starn have worked conceptually to cross disciplinary boundaries between photography, sculpture, and architectural installation. Employing unorthodox materials and techniques, the Starns have used materials ranging from layered fused glass panels and wax to gilding and scotch tape. Layering of materials intensifies the mystery of their series of metaphoric images of trees, a series titled Structure of Thought.

The Starns use the intertwined branches of a tree (or is this a photograph of neurons?—they let us wonder) to visualize layers of ideas and connections in the mental and natural world. The Starns remind us that mental activity is far more complicated than a simple camera-recorded image. It is a complicated mass of intersections and layers.

This idea can be extended to the entire ecological world, with its complex webs of dependency. In this work, the notion of interdependency is enacted literally, as a photograph on transparent vellum is layered over a second underlying image to create a third image that could not exist without the other two.

Jacques Lowe was an internationally respected photojournalist with a distinguished career of work as a magazine photographer. During John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency, Lowe was the official campaign photographer. When the Kennedys moved to the White House, he became the President’s personal photographer. After the assassination of his friend Robert Kennedy, he moved to France, where he lived for eighteen years before returning to New York to renew his career. He published over thirty books on a variety of topics. In 1998, Lowe mounted a major exhibition at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, which was opened by Ambassador Felix Rohatyn.

In addition to portraits and commercial assignments, Lowe took many photographs of children, often his own. In this photograph, a boy balances on a tree trunk, capturing the innocence of a carefree day in the woods. This earthly paradise differs markedly from the felled trees in Robert Adams apocalyptic views of clear-cutting.

Photographs can be ends in themselves as works of art; they can also participate in larger projects as documents of site-specific or ephemeral productions. Beginning in the late 1960s, in reaction to the commercialization of art in the United States, artists including Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer began to make art by creating installations in natural settings or shaping the actual landscape. The photographs, drawings, and prints they made were tangible records of the projects as well as freestanding works of art. This approach, variously called “Land Art,” “Earthworks,” and “Earth Art,” has had a lasting impact on contemporary artists, including the Hungarian-born American concept-based artist, Agnes Denes.

Denes’ work has centered on environmental and ecological issues, with site-specific installations that examine land-reclamation, re-forestation, and human interaction with nature. The artist describes Tree-Mountain – A Living Time Capsule, conceived in 1982, as “a collaborative, environmental project that touches on global, ecological, social, and cultural issues.”[footnote]Agnes Denes, “Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule, 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years (1982-96),” unpublished document provided by the artist to the Middlebury College Museum of Art.[/footnote]

Between 1992 and 1996, 11,000 people planted 11,000 pine trees the Pinziö gravel pits, in Ylöjärvi, Finland to restore land that had been deforested through resource extraction. This natural “time capsule” exists on land set aside for 400 years. According to the artist, although the trees remain the property of the people who planted them, the trees may not be moved form the forest, and Tree Mountain can never be owned or sold.

Placed in an intricate pattern based on mathematical formula, the pattern visualized human intellect in harmony with nature, and the artist envisions this act of bioremediation lasting for centuries. Denes notes, “The trees must out-live the present era and, by surviving, carry our concepts into an unknown time in the future. If civilization as we know it ends or changes, there will be a reminder in the form of a strange forest for our descendants to ponder. They may reflect on an undertaking that did not serve personal needs but the common good and the highest ideals of humanity and its environment, while benefiting future generations.”[footnote]Agnes Denes, “Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule, 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years (1982-96),” unpublished document provided by the artist to the Middlebury College Museum of Art.[/footnote]

Jane Fulton Alt’s powerful photographic essay, The Burn, examines the topic of controlled burns done on Illinois prairies for ecological purposes. Drawn to the metaphoric aspects of these therapeutic burns, Alt ponders life, death, and healing in her photographs. Born in Chicago and living on the shores of Lake Michigan, Alt has explored a range of environmental issues in her photography.

Exhibition curator Kirsten Hoving and videographer Tatyana Bessmertnaya met with Alt in December 2016 to discuss her work:

Acclaimed photographer Robert Adams’ extended visual essay about the plight of forests in the Northwest, Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration, includes several images of ancient Sitka spruce trees. The largest spruce in the world, these trees may live for seven to eight hundred years and reach heights of two hundred feet or more. Confined to a narrow range from Alaska to northern California, Sitka spruce may be found from the seashore to elevations as high as three thousand feet. Prized for its very remarkable strength, due to its long, straight grain, the wood is used as spars in boat building and for the manufacture of small airplanes.

Adams is not interested in these uses of Sitka spruce lumber; for him, the appeal of these venerable trees rests in their link to the past, especially to an era before wide-scale timber harvesting. As Adams writes in Turning Back, “When the pioneers who settled in this forest went to town for supplies they spoke of going ‘outside.’ It is still possible to sense, in a few parks, a little of what it might have been like to live in the ancient woods, to be inside.”[footnote]Robert Adams, Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration (New York: Frankel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery, 2005), p. 24.[/footnote] This is the “back” to which Adams would have us turn – the values inherent in the original forest, still and undisturbed.

Adams notes that the dual themes of Turning Back are “the glory of the natural world and the tragic nature of human beings,” asking “What have we traded for this great forest?” The answer is present in the photographs of clear-cut forests and barren landscapes that comprise the majority of photographs in the series, envisioning what Adams has called an exhaustion of spirit. But this bleak message is countered by photographs of majestic trees, the Sitka spruce and Lombardy poplars that stand as encouragement to look beyond monetary profit to find spiritual reconciliation.

In 2006, Daniel Houghton filmed an interview with Robert Adams on the occasion of the exhibition, Turning Back, at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Below is an excerpt from that film.

William Wegman is known throughout the world for his inventive and witty photographs featuring his Weimaraner dogs in a variety of whimsical poses and guises. October 1981, Rangeley, Maine is a portrait of his first model, a dog named Man Ray, hidden under a layer of fall leaves. Man Ray sits below a sign forbidding hunting, trapping, or firearms that has ironically been used for target practice. A breed employed as hunting dogs, this camouflaged Weimaraner seems dressed to defy the edict, although his hunched pose conveys a mood of resignation.

For Wegman, Maine is a kind of Eden, offering escape from his busy life in New York. As he puts it, “Nothing bad happens in Maine….”[footnote]For a delightful romp through Wegman’s fascination with nature, see William Wegman, Hello Nature (Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2012).[/footnote] He often works in the fall, posing Man Ray’s successors in bucolic settings. Wegman first encountered the Rangeley Lakes Region as a teenager, and he has spent summers there for over three decades. Nature has also played an important part in Wegman’s art, going back to his book, Field Guide to North America and Other Regions, published in 1993, which featured paintings, drawings, and essays about the natural world.

Like the work of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Wegman’s oeuvre is marked by a purposeful naïveté that combines humor with a deeper critique of ways that nature has been both revered and altered by humans.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Arthur F. Kales worked in the pictorialist style popularized by Alfred Stieglitz and his magazine, Camera Work. Pictorialists believed that photography deserved equal status to painting and other forms of artistic printmaking, and they made photographs that emulated the look of other high art media, such as charcoal drawings, etchings, or paintings. Soft focus and other photographic techniques were used to achieve this goal.

Born in the Arizona Territory, Kales moved to California in 1903 to study law at Berkeley. While in the Bay Area, he became interested in photography, especially the budding California pictorialist movement. Kales published numerous essays about American pictorialist photography in the journal Photograms of the Year, and he was awarded a fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.

Nude in a Forest is typical of Kales’ ethereal subjects and style. The nude is carefully lit to emphasize her smooth skin, in comparison to the rough bark and dark setting of the trees behind her. Timeless and universal, Kales’ female figure seems to inhabit an Eden before the fall, where humans co-exist in innocent harmony with the natural world.

Unlike earlier photographers of Western scenes, such as Carleton Watkins, who often included figures in their natural scenes to suggest an uneasy relationship between humans and the vastness of the wilderness, by the early twentieth century photographers like Kales looked to nature with dreamy nostalgia, perhaps seeking refuge from an increasingly industrial world of steam engines, skyscrapers, cars, and railroads.