Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Trees Inside and Out by Judith Belzer

This is a project that we did last March for Judith Belzer. We built the boxes that house Belzer's paintings. The space, home to Christina Kim's clothing company, Dosa Inc., is located in Downtown Los Angeles.
“Trees Inside Out”, my installation at Dosa818 in downtown L.A., employs architecture, drawing and painting to explore our relationship with nature. The painted images of tree bark, set into the hand-drawn plywood walls of two, small structures –one squat and stump-like, the other shooting upward-- might clue you in to what you can expect to see once you step up and inside.   Entering the intimate, protected space within, you are invited to take an imaginative leap into the center of a tree. And in fact, there inside, you'll find several painted images on canvas that are about wood: tree rings, wood grain, and other patterning that might or might not be recognizable as specifically tree-like.   As you look at the paintings, housed within these structures made from thin slices of tree glued together (plywood), you are invited to think about trees and wood from the inside out, in its most natural, pristine form as well as its most mundane industrial application.  "Trees Inside Out" brings painted images of natural forms, as well as elements of unreconstructed nature, into a constructed urban setting and asks us to consider just how entwined nature and culture are in our everyday lives.
 ~Judith Belzer
More about Judith Belzer here.
More about Dosa, Inc here.
See full set of the opening at Janine's flickr here.