The Elastic Forest
Increasingly, a lifeless caricature of nature has replaced the real, substituting a Disneyfied, sterile vision of the forest. Murals and constructions around us parade the natural world as simple, tamed, and relentlessly benign. Too often we experience nature digitally, behind distorting glass, or from speeding cars as trees blur into abstraction.
To what extent are each of us affected by this disconnection from the natural world? At what point does internalizing this artificial idea of nature alienate us from our own complicated wildness?
The series concludes with unsentimental images from the woods. After 120 years of old growth logging on Bowen Island, my home in the Pacific Northwest, the forests still hold beautiful and complex systems surrounding decaying 1000 year old trees. Erosion, water, insects, and gravity soften stumps into alien shapes, while the accumulation of windfall branches adds to the disarray. As shoots, saplings and trees grow from the mulch, the resulting landscape is messy and even disturbing: unequal parts battlefield, graveyard and nursery. Walking among these intricate processes reminds us that nature is regenerative and complicated, perhaps offering a different perspective on our own mortality.
Marty Levenson
February 2024