FAMILY TREE

elin o'Hara slavick, Madeleine Slavick, Sarah Slavick, and Susanne Slavick

USA TOUR:
Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre PA, April 22 – June 1, 2025

Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Allentown PA, January – March, 2025

Erie Art Museum, Erie PA, May 18 -  November 19 , 2023

Dowd Gallery, SUNY Cortland, October 24 - December 2, 2022

Erie Art Museum gallery tour here

Erie Art Museum installation documentation here

Dowd Gallery virtual tour here

Dowd Gallery documentation here

10min videos by the four artists here

An extensive Maine Art Journal article about the project here.

Dowd Gallery press release here:

Info here

Programmed events at SUNY Cortland here. (Scroll down chronologically.)

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The College Art Association CAA Committee on Women in the Arts chose Family Tree Whakapapa as an April 2021 pick with this summary:

This exhibition brings together the artwork of four sisters living in different parts of the globe and focuses on the related but distinct ways they engage with the arboreal imagination. Tangled into their photographs, paintings, life histories, and political commitments, the trees in their artwork are intricate lines, bold shapes, diffuse traces, and stylized patterns. Defying the ease with which the genealogical and botanical connect in the figure of the family tree, the Slavick sisters make it a thing of wonder: rooted in the ground and multiplying in our imaginations, family trees are botany and biology written with longing, hope, history, and loss.

FAMILY TREE features the work of four sisters: elin o’Hara Slavick (Irvine CA), Madeleine Slavick (Wairarapa, New Zealand), Sarah Slavick (Boston MA) and Susanne Slavick (Pittsburgh PA).  As curators, painters, photographers and writers, all have incorporated images of trees in social, political and environmental conditions — trees that stand as refuge and livelihood, consumed and consuming, under assault and triumphant, as historical record and as harbinger of things to come. The exhibition offers perspectives both unsettling and soothing as nature increasingly reflects salient issues of our times.

In its beauty and bounty, nature is often regarded as benign and apolitical. We do not expect a tree to assume an editorial stance or embody ideology. The conceptual, analytical and sensual intersect in Family Tree with works that probe the multitude of relations within and between trees and humans. Branching out to, and from, the world, the artists address a variety of concerns.

Based on her experiences in Japan, elin o’Hara slavick presents photographic works that bear witness to the ongoing aftermath of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear power disaster in Fukushima. Madeleine Slavick’s photographs reveal dichotomies and their collapses in our experience of nature in environments both rural and urban—they decry the marginalization of trees.  Sarah Slavick’s paintings explore the underground life of trees in an elegiac series that conveys both grief and hope, for what is threatened and for what might survive through possible strategies that trees offer—for all species on the planet.  Susanne Slavick hand paints trees derived from ‘tree of life’ carpet designs over printed scenes of environmental destruction and depredation. These trees do not lie down like doormats; they rise up and persist, suggesting the possibility of recovery.

FAMILY TREE WHAKAPAPA premiered at Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton, New Zealand, December 12, 2020 – February 14, 2021 and traveled to Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, NZ, April 21 - June 13, 2021.

Note: "Whakapapa" is a Maori concept that refers to placing oneself in a wider context, and linking oneself to land and community.