Even though we now understand the moon and its effects on our planet, culturally we still long to see it as mystical and often portray it romantically. In this piece I am playing with a natural icon that humanity has always grappled with for meaning and purpose. Here the moon is free from the earth to mingle with other moons and go where it will.
With this work I use trees as a symbolic stand in for what we think of as nature. They convey a feeling of stasis in being grounded and stable. I reinforce this stasis or static effect with the symmetry of the image, but then break that stability with moments of strange movement. By rearranging the orientation of the trees, our view of the natural world becomes inverted into something unnatural and unfamiliar. We know what we are looking at, but struggle to make sense of it.
Digital video is projected into the corner of a room. In the video the artist rolls a tree stump across the floor and up the wall in an endless circle. The idea of rolling this big heavy stump around in circles reminded me of Sisyphus from Greek mythology. The unending pointlessness of rolling it around and around and around suggests the absurdity of our everyday frustrations, the repetitively routine actions of life, how extreme effort can go unrecognized or unrewarded, etc….
Plants and flowers are absurdly destroyed, erased, mangled, yet continue to come back and reestablish themselves. In doing so I am playing off humanity’s blatant destruction of nature, and our culture’s attitudes in relation to what is considered desirable/coveted (such as flowers) and undesirable/destroyed (such as weeds)