Selva Oscura: Drawing of Dead Standing

2012

11:10 minute cycle
two-channel video and sound installation with lodge pole pine bench, four book matched lodge pole pine planks and fourteen mountain pine beetles.

The installation was made with timber from a pine beetle infested forest in the Rocky Mountain West and two video projections.  The right video channel is a media representation of a dead standing, lodge pole pine forest.  The camera observes the forest studying the trees with long gazes and quick glances, morphing into surveillance and dominance.  The performative act of drawing is used in the left channel to reflect on the human’s place in the decimated forest and to memorialize the forest. Dead Standing is informed by Aldo Leopold’s 1949 text “Thinking Like a Mountain” where he enlarged the boundaries of community to not be people-centric, but to include humans, soil, water, plants, and animals. 

Exhibition:

2011 Currier Museum, New Hampshire, Shifting Terrain
2013 Long House Project, New York City