Tree Studies.

These came from a rough, unfinished idea. The images here didn't work out quite how I had wanted and so were never printed. The idea came mostly from an article by Jeff Wall on the work of Rodney Graham, including his millenial time machine, a plan for a sculpture incorporating a camera obscura focused on a growing tree (the sculpture was realized in a different form on the UBC campus). Wall talked about Graham's depiction of the tree in the camera obscura being a perfect metaphore for the individual saying, "the lone tree is the great ancient symbol of the mortal individual." So my first idea was to essentially anthropomorphize a lone tree, puting it into various dangerous situations... cornered in a car's headlights in a garage, sitting in the tub with the water rising and a toaster teetering on the edge, getting ready to jump from a bridge... but it didn't quite materialize clearly. The next idea is the tree-individual burning, again in different locales and situations, but the idea is still unfinished as I've said... in any case, I still enjoy some of the images.