Tree Talk: Artists Speak For Trees
Thursday, August 26
10am PT, 11am MT, 12pm CT, 1pm ET
EUROPE: Scotland/Ireland/England/Belgium/Germany/Portugal: 18:00 BST
Dawn Roe, Tosca Teran, Marie Thibeault, Anne Yoncha
The entanglements of a forest are vast, complex and mysterious. Today artists seek to understand and express the interconnectedness of trees with all living beings. Each month members included in the online exhibition and book Embodied Forest, launching in September, will share their diverse artworks and ideas about our human relationship with trees and forests.
For our August 2021 Tree Talk, Dawn Roe will present her project Wretched Yew, which engages with the Taxus brevifolia genus of yew tree found in the Pacific Northwest. Tosca Teran will share her bio-sonification installation, Forest UnderSound, which invites us to consider the sentience of fungi. Marie Thibeault will discuss her large-scale oil paintings in response to direct encounters with stressed or altered landscapes including the remains of wildfires that are ravaging California. Anne Yoncha will speak about her artworks, which explore the mechanics of plant physiology and translates these processes to build affinity with unfamiliar ecologies.
Tree Talk is moderated by Sant Khalsa, ecofeminist artist and activist, whose work has focused on critical environmental and societal issues including forests and watersheds for four decades.
Co-sponsored by Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts
Members and one guest are free. General Public can attend for $10. Capacity is 100 participants. All participants MUST REGISTER.
Presenters:
Dawn Roe's project Wretched Yew engages with the Taxus brevifolia genus of yew tree found in the Pacific Northwest. A vital component of forest ecosystems, Pacific yew was largely eradicated in the 1990s during indiscriminate logging operations and bark harvesting yet scattered old growth yew remain and new saplings continue to emerge. Works from the series function as both elegy and specter, offering reverence for this tree as a marker of endurance. Roe is Professor of Studio Art in the Rollins College Department of Art & Art History. Working between and within the still and moving image, her projects examine the role of these media in shaping personal and social understandings of our environment through site-responsive engagement. Roe’s photographs and videos are exhibited regularly throughout the U.S. and internationally. dawnroe.com
Image: Dawn Roe, Conditions for an Unfinished Work of Mourning: Wretched Yew, 2020, HD video with Audio, dimensions variable
Tosca Teran's Forest UnderSound is an invitation to consider the sentience of fungi. Sentience is the ability to perceive one’s environment, and experience sensations such as pain and suffering, or pleasure and comfort. Teran’s works incorporate realtime, nonhuman bio-sonification illicit strong emotional, empathic responses towards other than human organisms. Teran is an interdisciplinary, human holobiont, whose work is a confluence of art, ecology, and craft. Her projects have received support from the Goethe-Institute, The Canada Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council for her immersive, fungal bio-sonification projects. Fall 2021, Tosca was awarded a residency at the Coalesce Centre for Biological Art, where she will continue researching fungi frequencies and biomes through Atomic Force, SEM and Confocal microscopy. toscateran.com
Image: Tosca Teran, Forest UnderSound, 2021, bio-sonification installation, various native plants of Ontario, Ganoderma lucidum, Pleurotus ostreatus, bio-sonification modules, custom Eurorack system, transducers, terrarium, 57 x 27 x 20 x 9 inches
Marie Thibeault's large-scale oil paintings address the tension of urban landscape and the natural world. Tree structures have always haunted Thibeault’s paintings and have appeared in various symbolic forms over time. Her most recent work is a response to direct encounters with stressed or altered landscapes. Disappearing Act depicts the remains left from the wildfires that have ravaged California in the past few years. Her paintings reference photographic imagery and employ layering, rupture, and stratification to evoke a sense of deep time and multiple viewpoints. Thibeault’s recent solo exhibitions include Weathering at Gremillion Fine Art, Conveyance, at the Long Beach Museum of Art, and Illuminations at Von Fraunberg Gallery in Dusseldorf. Her work has been reviewed in several publications, including Artillery Magazine, Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, and Art in America. Thibeault is Professor Emerita at CSU Long Beach. Her studio is in San Pedro, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean where she walks daily with her two poodles. mariethibeault.com
Image: Marie Thibeault, Disappearing Act, 2021, oil on canvas, 78 x72 inches
Anne Yoncha's work explores the mechanics of plant physiology, such as the tension that brings water up a Ponderosa pine against the force of gravity, or the artificial water table manufactured by peatland mosses. By translating these processes into artworks, she aims to build affinity with unfamiliar ecologies apparently out of sight or possessing different temporalities than our own. Yoncha is Assistant Professor of Art at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, she earned her MFA at University of Montana and completed a Fulbright fellowship at Natural Resources Institute Finland, collaborating with restorationists on art-science work about post-extraction peatland. Since 2019, she has collaborated with artists, biologists, and programmers in the High Altitude Bioprospecting work-group, exhibiting in the UK and Finland. anneyoncha.com
Image: Anne Yoncha (in collaboration with composer Shari Feldman, cello by Julia Marks), Succession, a Visual Score, 2019, dye made from locally-sourced cedar and Lake Ogallala water with graphite on paper, with digital overlay of 2 minutes of MIDI biodata recorded from an eastern red cedar (red) and mixed prairie grasses directly below its canopy (blue), 3 x 4 feet
