A college professor of mine once made our 20-person seminar go outside to find what we thought was a “good tree,” and just sit with it for a while, thinking about what made it good.
For most of us, a good tree was one we were drawn to aesthetically, by its stature or the symmetry of its branches. The lesson was that these trees have grown well because they have access to nutrients in the soil, the proper amount of sunlight and rain, not too much wind or cold, and a genetic disposition to grow straight and tall. But a tree that’s grown crookedly is one that’s grown through obstacles.
When a tree takes center stage in a work of contemporary art — such as Jennifer Steinkamp’s mesmerizing, digitized Judy Crook 9, currently on view at the Hopkins Center’s Top of the Hop, opposite the window looking out to East Wheelock Street in Hanover — there’s a lot of pressure on the tree to express something new.
It can represent, as it did in that class exercise, how the conditions we grow up in can shape the trajectory of our lives. But it also signifies, in creation stories the world over, the beginning of life on earth. They’ve been objects of worship and markers of graves. We’ve adopted its form to represent ancestry, eternity, the environment. We miss the forest for the trees. We branch out. We return to our roots.
Enter Steinkamp’s video installation, which is named for one of her most beloved art teachers and is projected onto a slightly curved, 10-foot-tall surface. It depicts a quintessentially “good tree” — slender of trunk, graceful of limb — spinning through the seasons.
“Ever since the literary notion of the Tree of Life,” said John Stomberg, director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, in a talk he gave last week about Steinkamp’s work, “the tree has long carried a heavy burden of content in art and literature.” And Judy Crook 9 comes with “broad philosophical underpinnings” that exist in dialogue with these burdens: “This is a tree that doesn’t actually die,” he said. “Is this a statement of belief?”
But Steinkamp, who lives in Los Angeles and is 59, breaks a number of rules — death is only one — over the course of her tree’s seasons.
As the tree enters spring, delicate pink buds come in just before the leaves do; they never unfurl into blossoms, but grow to about the size of a small fruit before falling lightly to the ground. At this, the tree’s branches seem to sigh, as if they feel lighter, and its leaves darken slightly to signify the passage into summer. Not surprisingly, Steinkamp seems to have had the most fun, color-wise, with autumn foliage: She’s programmed green leaves to bleed into a striking crimson that calls to mind a mid-October maple, though she noted in an email this week that the tree isn’t modeled after any particular species.
By the end of the fall season, the tree has become a skeleton of many moving, and more visible, parts. Though it lacks the leafy drama of the other seasons, wintertime reveals the convolution of branches and twigs that Steinkamp has created, which seem to twist and coil and toss about of their own accord, like a nest of snakes that is also a single organism. Eventually, the buds grow back in, and the cycle continues.
Throughout all of this, the upper body of the tree — above where the trunk meets the bottom of the lowest branches — swivels and swings in a movement that is at once meditative and potentially dizzying to watch, if you’re prone to motion sickness. Over the phone this week, Steinkamp said this motion was inspired by a dervish performance she saw on a trip to Istanbul.
The trunk stands still, though.
“Because trunks don’t move,” she said. “That would be silly.”
An arbitrary rule, or maybe a practical one. She also captures, rather accurately, the way shifting leaves throw shadows across the trunk, their branches and each other, and how in winter, a few recalcitrant leaves cling to the otherwise bare branches.
But the most memorable elements of Judy Crook 9 are those that exist in ways not possible for a tree of this earth. Its lowest limbs, which in a real tree should be sturdy, gently undulate with the rest of the branches; its buds, which fall to the ground unopened, disrupt the expected order of things; and a seam is visible between the upper, moving body of the tree and its unmoving lower half.
“Like the paint drip on the canvas,” Stomberg said on Wednesday, pointing out that Steinkamp could easily have smoothed over the scar if she’d wanted. “A reminder that everything about this was a decision.” A reminder, too, of the tree’s artifice, and the unnaturalness of its creation.
This creation, Steinkamp said in a phone call this week, comes from a computer program called Autodesk Maya, commonly used to make video games or special effects for movies. She started using the program in the early 1990s, back when digital art was somewhat controversial, because not everyone was on board with what computers could do.
But in her eyes, they can do more than just about any other medium. “With things like trees (in Maya), I can play around with ‘dynamics,’ ” Steinkamp said, and explained that “dynamics” allow her to “simulate a certain amount of natural phenomena, like wind and gravity.”
But there’s also a certain amount of randomness in the outcome.
“A bit like watercolor,” she said. “You never quite know what you’re going to get. The software does what it wants … then I render it differently if I don’t like it.” The end result is a combination of Steinkamp’s creative control — rules she changed, natural forces she customized — and Maya.
Though the tree’s movements are the result of both human design and an algorithm, in some ways Judy Crook 9 appears more alive than any real-life tree — especially now, when all our deciduous trees are dormant and bare, and tend not to whirl like dervishes. Judy Crook 9 isn’t pretending to have the same kind of value to us as a real tree, but it also doesn’t rot, or get diseases, or die. In terms of what makes a “good tree,” there might be no better growing conditions than an artist’s imagination,
“There’s something so optimistic and wonderful and hopeful to be sitting here on a cold winter night, watching a tree that always has its spring again,” said Stomberg.
If you go to see it, make sure you look out the Hop’s tall windows behind you. Superimposed onto the Dartmouth Green, whose trees this time of year stand gray and lifeless, the reflection of Judy Crook 9 comes into full bloom.
Openings and Receptions
The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Arts Program, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, opens its Winter Art Exhibition tonight. The show features work by seven New England-based artists: still lifes of tea sets by Ted Arnold, of Portland, Maine; pastels, watercolors and oil paintings by Don Collins, of Lebanon; oil paintings of landscapes by Myles Danaher, of Brattleboro, Vt.; photographs by Erik Eskedal, of Wakefield, Mass.; oil paintings of animals by Sam Morgan, of Lyman, N.H.; en plein air paintings of Vermont structures by Georgie Runkle of Marlboro, Vt.; and colored pencil drawings by Corrina Thurston, of Barre, Vt. Twenty-five percent of art sales will benefit the D-H Arts Program.
Also part of the opening is “Lincoln in Negative Space: The Intersection of Imaging and Art,” the result of a collaboration between Dartmouth-Hitchcok’s radiology department and Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish. The display will reveal the insides of long-sealed artifacts by the celebrated sculptor.
A reception starts at 5 p.m. at the Level 4 South Entrance Information Desk, next to the parking garage entrance. Remarks and introductions will come at 5:30, followed by a self-guided art walk through the exhibitions. It ends at 6:30.
Saturday night from 5 to 7, the Chandler Gallery in Randolph will hold an opening reception for “A Closer Look,” an exhibition featuring the photography of Valerie Daniel, of Bethel; watercolors and mixed media work by Judy Laliberte, of Quechee; and chalk pastels by Jo Levasseur, of South Royalton. Through March 3.
“Before the Storm,” an exhibition of abstract landscapes by the Barre, Vt., painter Jennifer Palkowski Jacques, goes up Wednesday at the Tunbridge Public Library. The opening reception on Feb. 11, from 2 to 4 p.m., is free and open to the public. Through March 7.
David Fisk’s show, “Challenge and Happiness in Abstract Painting,” continues through Friday.
Call for Entries
The Library Arts Center in Newport, N.H., is asking artists to submit works in a variety of media for the exhibition “Black and White,” which will run at the LAC from Feb. 10 through April 7. Artists may submit paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photography, mixed media, fiber arts and weavings, as long as they are executed in black, white and gray. The deadline for entries is Sunday. For information and registration, go to libraryartscenter.org/exhibits/call-for-entries.
The VA Medical Center in White River Junction is seeking ready-to-hang artwork on the theme of “Sources of Hope.” Submissions must be in two-dimensional media, such as paintings, photos and poetry, and no larger than 16 by 24 inches. The deadline is Feb. 1. For more information, email vhawrjArtExhibit@va.gov.
Ongoing
AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon. Showing prints bySheri Hancock-Tomek, of Hanover; pottery by Sarah Heimann, of Lebanon; multimedia artwork by Cecelia Kane, of Peacham, Vt.; and paintings by Craig Sterrit, of White River Junction. On view through Feb. 2. Sterritt gives a talk next Thursday at 6 p.m.
AVA also continues to show “Seasons,” encaustic nature paintings by the Thetford Center artist William N. Peabody, through Jan. 26.
BigTown Gallery, Rochester, Vt. A retrospective exhibition of paintings by Nancy Taplin, of Warren, Vt., is on view until March 31.
The gallery has cut back its hours for January, and will be open only on Wednesday and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Center for the Arts, New London. The Juried Regional Exhibition, which features work by 20 New Hampshire artists, runs through Jan. 27.
Chelsea Public Library. “Photographs: A Teenage Perspective,” a show by Strafford resident and Sharon Academy student Hadley Greene, runs through February.
Chew & Co. Design, Hanover. The egg tempera and gold leaf paintings of Windsor artist Gary Milek are on view through February.
Claremont Opera House. Rural Outright, the LGBTQ support program of Claremont-based nonprofit TLC Family Resource Center, shows art by Upper Valley students in an exhibit on the theme of #KindnessInAction. Through Feb. 17.
Converse Free Library, Lyme. Thetford ceramicist Amanda Ann Palmer’s show, “Recent Explorations in Clay,” includes rustic pieces as well as items from Palmer’s “Relics” series, inspired by seed pods. Ten percent of art sales will go toward the Friends of Lyme Library. Through March 30.
Hartland Public Library. The aptly titled “It’s Cold Outside” features the work of the Odanaksis ArtGroup, a cluster of Upper Valley artists who gather weekly to paint, mostly outdoors. Through Feb. 14.
Hood Downtown, Hanover. “Reason’s Oxymorons,” a video installation by the French-Algerian artist and philosopher Kader Attia, dissects Western and non-Western conceptions of mental illness through a range of interviews. There will be an artist talk and lecture Jan. 30, from 4:45 to 6 p.m. Through March 18.
Hopkins Center, Hanover. Judy Glantzman, Dartmouth College’s artist-in-residence, exhibits recent work in drawing, painting, mixed media collage and sculpture in clay and carved wood in “Vigilant on Behalf of Kindness.” On view in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery through March 4.
Howe Library, Hanover. The annual show by Hanover High School students in grades 9 through 12 media includes drawing, photography, digital art, collage, printmaking, sculpture and jewelry. Through January.
Kilton Public Library, West Lebanon. East Randolph artist Marcia Hammond exhibits oil portraits through Jan. 31.
Norman Williams Public Library, Woodstock. “Paint Vermont,” by Bridgewater Corners resident and ArtisTree teacher Rae Newell, is on view through Feb. 14.
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Hanover. Sisters Patti Warren, of Lebanon, and Rosalie desGroseilliers, of Hardwick, Vt., exhibit work in “The Zen of Watercolor.” Through Feb. 27.
Philip Read Memorial Library, Plainfield. Christopher Rollins and Jenny Sprague, both of Plainfield, show their work in “Mending the Boom, Musicians & Local Color” through January.
Scavenger Gallery, White River Junction. “The Art of Place,” a show of encaustic paintings by Quechee artist Helen Shulman, is on display, in addition to work by Margaret Jacobs, Rich Fedorchack and owner Stacy Hopkins.
Scavenger will be open Wednesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., during January and February. To make an appointment outside of these times, call 603-443-3017.
Taylor Gallery, Kimball Union Academy, Meriden. Cornish artist and KUA graduate Jim Schubert exhibits abstract and figural latex paintings in “Ocular Means.” Sales benefit the Hartford social services nonprofit Upper Valley Haven. Through Feb. 10.
Two Rivers Printmaking Studio, White River Junction. The studio continues its Holiday Show through January.
White River Gallery at BALE, South Royalton. “Post-Apocalyptic Woodcuts for ¾ Empire” by Peter Schumann, founder of the politically-minded, Glover, Vt.-based theater company Bread and Puppet Theater, is on view through March 3. An opening reception, featuring a performance by Schumann & Co., is scheduled for Feb. 3 from 2 to 5 p.m. Admission is by donation.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.