An outdoor site work for the Tree Museum consisting of a square cloud drawing on a birch bark covered panel and a circular marble moon. A sloped expanse of dark granite scattered with spots of pale lichen provided a suitably celestial site for the moon. An 8' high erratic at the edge of the adjacent forest suggested a natural plinth. Equivalents (Tree Museum) looks both at the practice of making artworks "after" or in relation to historical precedents and at the idea of a surrogate for or facsimile of "real" nature. The cloud, like related prints and drawings, is redrawn from a 19th century example. The work also addresses a series of photographs by Vic Muniz titled Equivalents (Museum of Modern Art) that use the museum's veined marble floor as a stand in for cloudy skies. Muniz's work was made in response to Alfred Stieglitz's Equivalents - dramatic photographs of moonlit scenes. The Tree Museum site presented the opportunity to consider the possibility of equivalents - and a broader history of the representation of natural phenomena - in the context of both nature and museum. |
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