LARGE SCALE SCULPTURE
Installed for the exhibition "Forest for the Trees" at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA, "The Forest" employs the malachite green of Greco-Roman polychromy in a series of fifteen monoliths.
This triptych’s three parts are named separately: Fir Tree How True, Abete Cosi Fedele, and Tanne Baum Wie Treu, in English, Italian, and German. The series of 15 monolithic posts or pillars represent a forest of trees, and arises from my own forested upbringing as well as theories which point to trees and wood-carving as the origin of column construction. The panels of “The Forest” are painted in various shades of Malachite green, one of the original mineral pigments used in Greco-Roman sculpture and architecture. While the pillars appear to “grow” from left to right, they actually follow the musical notation of the first line of an original version of “O Tannenbaum”, a Silesian folk song concerning fidelity and true-ness, which is also the first of the Roman values outlined in the Mos Maiorum (ancestral custom).
The panels of “The Forest” are painted in various shades of Malachite green, one of the original mineral pigments used in Greco-Roman sculpture and architecture. I use pigment in various saturations to both replicate the experience of an object in different lighting at different times of day, and to cause disorientation as to where the object ends and surrounding space begins, similar to the experience of walking deep into the forest.