Remembering Trees
Remembering Trees
‘Seized by the Left Hand’ at Dundee Contemporary Art was an exhibition brought together in the context of Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 novel ‘Left Hand of Darkness. It brought together fifteen disparate artists working in different art forms to imagine alternative world-views.
Four artworks by Colombian artist Abel Rodriguez caused me to pause for a while. His tropical forest landscapes utilise sensitive lines and watery paint and convey a magical relationship to the place. The diverse characters in the works are individually nuanced but nothing is given more importance than anything else. The detailed flora, fauna and wildlife, invoke a system of entanglement and human and nature co-habitation. Float mounted in wooden frames the images present as islands of unspoiled abundance each with a flourishing ecosystem existing apart.
Within the context of the exhibition, the forest images were the most radical in their reimagining of environmental relationship to place and yet they were not another ‘planet away’. Inspired and informed by the artist’s own Nonuya ancestral knowledge and lived experience from many years before, they convey a form of understanding rapidly disappearing in the globalisation race for economic growth.
As I contemplated dwindling indigenous relations to place the noise of the city filtered through the gallery windows and up from the cafe below. My imaginings of differing world realities, expanded from the picture to the exhibition space, and then out toward the city itself. Within these contrasting environments, it was the fact of plant blindness, prevalent in much of Western life, that was the markedly audible presence in my mind.
These images of the forest preserved in frames, within a gallery, located in a city, situated in a cultural landscape, offered a vision of an integrated way of living with ‘otherness’ that might well be the necessary philosophy of co-existence becoming urgent in these unfolding climate change times.
In 2914 Ursula Le Guin said: - “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”