17 July 2007 in Articles
Proposal for Contemporary Museum St. Louis Great Rivers Biennial
Art/experience; digital/real; the line drawn between the artificial world and the natural one is invented and erroneous. We do not create outside of nature so much as rearrange the elements extant within it. In recent times, this rearranging has come under heat, both literally and figuratively, and for good reason. Is our civilization of nature an inevitably corruptive force? Is our enjoyment of natural space compatible with our ever-expanding embrace of digital technology? As we stroll through the park with cell phone in pocket, or transfer bucolic vacation scenery into pixilated megabytes, our interaction with the natural world is ever more influenced (and often, unsettled) by an awareness of the “unnatural” media that surrounds us. But need that divide between nature and technology prove so disquieting? What if, in fact, our experience of trees and flowers could become more intimate, more visually democratic, when mediated by the artificial?
For the past two years, I have been “collecting” trees and plants by drawing their contours directly into the computer. I’ve notated the simple outlines of leaves, branches, and limbs, by doggedly tracing their outlines with an electronic pen and tablet. The digital medium describes all things equally; near and far, the large and the small, without the prejudice inherent in our familiar acts of looking. The idiosyncrasies of my hand trace over limbs photographed from multiple points of view. Through the process of zooming in and out, the drawings capture information outside the experience of the human eye or camera. The closer one gets to these works, the more one can see. The tops of the trees are as visible as the bottoms; the back branches are as visible as the front. The drawing exists at no set scale, line weight or color. It is a pure act of drawing, evoking a mental map of the natural world in some of its most humble and underappreciated typologies.
The tree and the garden have been regarded as places of everyday solace, but here their fractalized patterns unsettle as much as comfort. Since only the contours are recorded and all other information discarded (color, shade, texture), a surprising system of chiaroscuro results. Giant Hollyhocks virtually disappear as simple bubbles of line, while the tiny flowers of the Yarrow darken in knots of complexity. A tone scale from light to dark results not from light and shade, but from the amassing of equally weighted lines. When the drawing is printed (through an inkjet or c-print process) the results are an odd amalgam of freehand drawing and mechanical reproduction. The work is situated between a traditional visual and post-photographic language. The lines are simultaneously spontaneous and gestural and fastidious and infinitely reproducible.
Heretofore, I have not had the opportunity to showcase the work at full scale or complexity. Just as I have cobbled together the various parts of a tree to make a whole tree, I would like to stitch all of the separate drawings together into a completely drawn environment, one in which the viewer’s simultaneously natural and technological situatedness, is conspicuously felt.
With this grant I would turn the museum space into a “hothouse,” a drawn simulacrum of the natural world that underscores how we, as human viewers, perceive nature under the influence of technology. The context and space would provide the ripe “ground” necessary to explore and confront our indebtedness to, and place within the natural world.