Curator: Tina Plokarz
24 September – 30 December 2022
Forest Makings was a group exhibition featuring sculptures, paintings, textiles and installations that explore how humans influence forests and manage their survival through practices of conservation. While shedding light on the environmental benefits of forests and the threats posed by changing climates, Forest Makings was an invitation to consider our own responsibility towards the health of forests and the survival of the earth.
Recognizing the importance of forests as solutions to rising temperatures, air pollution, and habitat and biodiversity loss, the exhibition Forest Makings took the Schuylkill Center’s landscape as a starting point for bringing forests and their protagonists, trees, into focus. Without making any claim to comprehensiveness, the exhibition offered a glimpse into a wide range of conservation strategies – from reforestation to natural regeneration to controlled burns – and into our emotional connection to nature.
Forest Makings presented artworks by Jean Shin, Ana Vizcarra Rankin, Aaron Terry, Amir Campbell, Tali Weinberg, Vivien Wise, and instrument makers Gladys Harlow, Richard Robinson, and Don Miller (as part of the art project S(tree)twork by Futurefarmers).
www.avrankin.com | www.aaroneliahterry.com | www.amiraclearts.com | www.taliweinberg.com | https://streetworkproject.net/intra-galactic-forest/ | www.vivienwise.com
Forests today are in crisis: converted for agriculture, fuel and timber, depleted by fire and mistreated by an economy that extracts natural resources while putting biodiversity and ecosystems at risk and affecting the livelihood and wellbeing of local communities. Commercial agriculture and monocultural tree plantations feed our ever-growing population and desire for economic growth but also result in deforestation. Even though deforestation has existed since the earliest human civilizations, forest loss has exploded since the advent of industrialization, leaving only a shrinking third of the earth covered with arboreal habitats. At the same time our connection to and understanding of trees and forests has also diminished. Stewarding the forest for the benefit of humans and for its ecosystem is best practice at the Schuylkill Center. Through careful management and strategic planning, since the 1960s the landscape has been transformed from an exhausted farm to a forested gem that is dear to the public yet also threatened by climatic and habitat changes.
Generous support for this project has been provided by the Schuylkill Center’s environmental art program and with additional support for event programming by the National Wildlife Federation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Exhibition Archive at the Schuylkill Center here.
The artworks in this exhibition call attention to our connectedness to trees and how we can care for them into the future. S.O.S. by Jean Shin exemplifies the ferocious history of commercial logging of Hemlock trees for leather-making in the early 19th century. The tanbark industry diminished this species significantly, resulting in groundwater pollution and increasing vulnerability to soil erosion. International, national and local control mechanisms and management initiatives were launched to counteract the depletion of forests. Today, movements such as the Trillion Tree Campaign aim to turn the tides of forest loss. Their intention is to make worldwide reforestation and afforestation a socio-economic imperative that not only restores landscapes adapting to climatic change but also attaches monetary and legal values to trees. Forest Futures Growth by Ana Vizcarra Rankin visualizes the global potential tree cover that would be required to counterbalance our current carbon footprint. What might the world look like if forest ecosystems are not only respected for the sake of human survival but also for nature in its own right? As we see forests diminish, Memories of Future Fires and Tree Rings by Tali Weinberg asks us to consider our symbiotic relationship with trees and their roles in ecosystem health, climate mitigation, and carbon sequestration. When well-chosen, the controlled application of fire can help restore ecosystem health. But with the continuous encroachment of human activity and urbanization into forested land, its management has become more restricted, turning our relationship to trees and forests into a complicated and risky balancing act. The field recordings Seeding Newtopia by Aaron Terry and Amir Campbell, in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, are in search of our relationship with the natural world as expressed through our personal memories and feelings about trees. By collecting tree stories in our communities, the artists underscore that trees are connected, communicative and co-dependent members of diverse communities. The reciprocal altruism of trees and their care for the environment and each other also permeates Walnut Tree Quilt by Vivien Wise and the instruments by Gladys Harlow, Richard Robinson, and Don Miller, made from fallen trees in Germantown, Philadelphia, as part of the tree awareness project S(tree)twork by Futurefarmers. The quilt and the instrument call on us to practice the same kind of restorative care in our own relations to forests and to the environment.