Opening for Gina Siepel: To Understand a Tree

To Understand a Tree was inspired by a desire to contemplate a living forest tree and its immediate habitat from the perspective of a queer-identified woodworker, in a way that challenges and provokes an often-assumed binary between living tree and dead wood. To Understand a Tree functions as a small-scale way of exploring big questions about the place of humans in the environment, the scale and speed at which we consume natural resources, and which organisms are included or excluded in a definition of “community.” Forests are complex and interconnected systems, and in that spirit, To Understand a Tree connects material practice and object-making to questions of forest ecology, climate change, and more than human personhood. To Understand a Tree is an ongoing project of Gina Siepel as an artist in residence at the Smith College MacLeish Field Station.