The Elastic Forest
To walk amid the old growth stumps and regenerating forests of Bowen Island is to trespass in a foreign landscape of unequal parts battlefield, graveyard, and nursery. Here decaying trees show the effects of logging and erosion, while creating a chaotic mulch that feeds new growth: vital, messy and wild.
It is here, in the woods of Bowen Island, that I come closest to knowing my true age and to perceiving my mortality. There is grief, but in these moments I also know the meaning of my history - struggles, failures and successes, luck, good and bad.
The Elastic Forest series is a collection of ambiguous images from my life around British Columbia, intertwined with photographs of Bowen’s complex landscape. The organizing principle is the noticing of the intuitive connections between certain images, a murky affinity that is not always logical or linear, but sometimes obscure or even cryptic. The resulting sequence is a photographic stream of consciousness, an irrational image poem evoking a sense of our uneven, sometimes artificial, relationship with both the natural world and with our own nature.
Marty Levenson, August 2024