December 11, 2021—January 16, 2022
Vitality, a video/sound piece by Ashley Garr, focuses on burned but surviving trees, revealing the resilience and vitality of California’s most emblematic tree, the redwood.
Ashley Garr’s video/sound piece relates to the fires experienced in California due to our current climate crisis, and reveals the resilience and vitality of the redwood, one of California’s most notable trees. Using a stethoscope which she purposely modified, Garr captured sounds of water circulating within the trunks of these survivor trees. The video explores the trunks of charred trees up close, with shadowy, projected hand-drawn seed shapes moving across the bark or charred surfaces.
The artist writes, “My creative process is directly related to the environment and environmental issues our planet is currently facing. My most recent projects related to the fires and using the redwood tree’s ability to grow after fires as a form of hope for our Earth’s future as a whole. This project creates an intimate experience with seemingly invisible aspects of nature.”