Latest news with #Skirball
Forbes
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Charles Gaines' Calculus of Trees
Numbers and Trees: Tanzania Series 1, Baobab , Tree #4 , Maasai 2024 Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, 3 parts 241.3 x 335.9 x 14.6 cm / 95 x 132 1/4 x 5 3/4 in Trees are having a moment. There was Richard Powers 'The Overstory,' a slim novel where the point of view of a tree was as much a character as the human ones. There was Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg's recent exhibition at the Skirball (now moved on to new pastures, see here). More generally, scientists continue to explore how trees communicate with each other and the pathways they create through root networks and airborne transfers. And currently, there is Charles Gaines' magisterial new works, Numbers and Trees, The Tanzania Baobabs, at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood (on view through May 24, 2025). The exhibition consists of nine large three-part images and several two part watercolors that seem to progress in complexity and across a spectrum of color. The total effect is one of amazement and awe, of beauty and calm, transporting us away from our present world and all its conflicts. Portrait of Charles Gaines 2024 On the evening of the exhibition's opening, Gaines, in conversation at the gallery with LACMA curator Naima Keith and Phoenix Museum's Olga Viso (where Gaines also currently has a retrospective) spoke of how he wanted to eliminate 'the subjective in his art.' As the exhibition press release explains, in the work on exhibit, each tree has been assigned a distinctive color and number sequence. The profusion of colors each filling a small square creates a profusion of color as unique to Gaines' oeuvre as a Seurat pointillist masterpiece. The use of numbers and grids for image creation is, in one sense, an artist-created artificial intelligence that can generate an endless series of possible colors and images but that is, nonetheless, tightly controlled by Gaines' system. At the same, this method creates a distancing between the work and the viewer, a gap if you will, expressed as well by the separation in these works between the plexiglass and the photo behind it. Numbers and Trees: Tanzania Series 1, Baobab, Tree #5, Rangi 2024 Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, 3 parts 241.3 x 335.9 x 14.6 cm / 95 x 132 1/4 x 5 3/4 in In some of the works, the photo of the African landscape appears in the background while the color simulacrum appears in the foreground. In others, the Tree is in the foreground while there is a blown-up section of the branch architecture, what Gaines calls 'an explosion.' Gaines is now eighty, and his demeanor, as much as his work, remains thoughtful and quiet. Gaines' flight from the subjective does not mean, as some critics believe, an avoidance of the personal, or even the political. This exhibition puts that notion to rest. Installation view, 'Charles Gaines. Numbers and Trees, The Tanzania Baobabs,' Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, February 19 – May 24. 2024 With the new work, one might ask: Why travel to Tanzania to take a photo? The exhibition press release tell us, 'With Numbers and Trees, The Tanzania Baobabs, Gaines reflects on… the country's historical context, particularly in relation to the colonial enterprise, slave trade and personal identity.' That is about as personal and political as it can get. The baobab tree is called 'The Tree of Life' because it survives in arid areas where other trees do not. Its tangled network of branches extends into the sky, as if it were upside-down, its roots visible to all. 'Gaines' argument,' the press release notes, 'that aesthetic experience is not transcendent but rather firmly rooted in and shaped by culture' explains how the Tanzanian baobab and its numeric colored equivalents are Gaines' objective (not subjective) meditation on his roots, his personal and artistic history. Like the baobab, it is a display of Gaines' own rootedness, and how Numbers and Trees make connections to his personal history, to art history, to other artists, and to all who experience the work.
Forbes
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Trees Of Knowledge: Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg At The Skirball
Photo Courtesy of Ken Goldberg & Tiffany Shlain and The Skirball Cultural Center In my continuing 'better late than never' series of exhibitions I wished I had reviewed while open, but still feel are worth noting: Sometimes a small exhibition can cast a wide net. Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology, an exhibition of work by Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg at the Skirball Cultural Center (which was on view through March 2) is a great example of how a seemingly simple idea can not only be a work of art, but also provide a teaching moment, and be an engine for social action. Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg are a married couple who collaborate as artists. Goldberg is a professor of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, and Shlain is an successful author and interdisciplinary artist. Detail from The Tree of Knowledge by Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg For the exhibition, Shlain and Golberg repurposed salvaged tree sections whose time-marking rings are used to create taxonomies on certain subjects, such as the pursuit of knowledge, mathematics, California history, and Jewish history. This information was burned into the surface of the tree sections by a process known as pyrography (writing with fire, literally). 'Using ancient practices like pyrography alongside the newest predictive language technologies, like AI, Tiffany and Ken examine how history, the future, and hope can be intertwined in this ingenious exploration of trees and our natural environment,' said Skirball President and CEO Jessie Kornberg in the exhibition press release. 'Trees figure prominently across many religions, including the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, so exploring these and other narratives that trees may have borne witness to in the exhibition is fascinating.' Detail from Tree of Knowledge by Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg Given that this exhibition was at the Skirball, after seeing the works of salvaged wood I could have said 'Dayenu' – they are remarkable works, but Goldberg and Shlain have a more far reaching vision about the public health benefit of trees in cities. As part of the exhibition, they demonstrate how AI and machine learning can optimize our urban forests (the trees in our cities). Tracking trees by neighborhood, they propose, helps create a more sound environmental policy to, in their words, 'facilitate personal reflections and connections for visitors'. Inspired by artist Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles photo and video archive (1965–present in the Getty Collection), Goldberg and Shlain have created a bird's eye view of LA's urban treescapes overhead of four major LA thoroughfares, such as Hollywood, Sunset, Manchester, and Whittier Boulevards. The differences between their tree cover speak to the inequities in our urban ecology. Finally, Shlain and Goldberg also provided a website as a way for individuals to register the trees on their blocks or in their neighborhood to create custom tree tributes where individuals can add their personal reflections and learn about the tree's life and LA events. This small exhibition delivered (and has the potential to continue to deliver) insight, knowledge, new ways of seeing, experiencing, and enhancing the health of our cities. Or to put it in the language of bumper stickers, 'From small acorns grow might oaks.' This exhibition was housed in a small space, but its works and the ideas animating it are deep, large and expansive.
