After Life: A Wood Sculpture Exhibition

Program type: 
Dates: 
Friday, June 3, 2022 - 6:00pm to Friday, July 29, 2022 - 4:00pm

After Life: A Wood Sculpture Exhibition 

June 4th - July 29th, 2022

Curated by Andrzej Kramarz

With artists Henry Bianchini, Patrick Daniel Sarsfield, Daniel Sheinfeld Rodriguez, Randy Takaki, and Lonny Tomono. 

Wood, like few other valuable commodities, grows on trees; it’s used by woodpeckers, beavers, and humans for food, homes and heat. Trees promise shelter, tools, energy, and even humidity to other life. We use wood in constructions like cathedrals, and in deconstructions like fire; its formation, deformation, and transformation underpin earthly processes from oxygen generation to oil creation. Sapling to tree, germination to decomposition, trees are supple, resilient, rigid, then brittle. They can be solid, liquid, or gas – quite literally going up in smoke. 
 
Trees adapt to their ecosystems, spanning canopies, sheltering roots, providing armatures for flowers, fruits and seeds, seducing pollinators and consumers and distributors of their germ bodies. After death, they decompose, becoming nourishment for fungi, microorganisms, and ultimately seedlings – their progeny. Humans take a parallel, opportunistic advantage of these arboreal strategies to make lumber that spans bridges, rafters for roofs, mirroring forest canopies; we craft guitars to seduce our lovers (human pollination), manufacture popsicle sticks to eat ice cream, and deconstruct wood fueling our fires.  
 
The fortuitous preadaptations of the forest are manifest in the metaphors of sculpture, whether bent from supple pliability, carved from rigid maturity, shredded from ossified residues into paper, or charred in the alchemy of fire, transmogrified in the release of energy. Non-utilitarian art, crafted from wood, is made for nothing tangible. Rather, it is a manifestation of the abstract potential of metaphysical vision. After Life is an exhibition of the second life of trees, interpreted by sculptors, who, like our ancestors, return to the forest, to take a second look.
 

Join us for the first opening reception since 2020, on First Friday, June 3rd at 6PM.

Poster & Flyer: 
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