Elin, Madeleine, Sarah and Susanne Slavick
TSB Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, New Zealand
April 21 - June 13, 2021
FAMILY TREE WHAKAPAPA
Opening 11 December 5pm EST / 12th December 11am NZDT
MEDIA RELEASE
Four sisters exhibit together in Masterton and Auckland, New Zealand
Aratoi Museum of Art and History, with support from Masterton Creative Communities, presents Family Tree Whakapapa, featuring the work of four sisters: elin o’Hara Slavick (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA), Madeleine Marie Slavick (Wairarapa, New Zealand), Sarah Slavick (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) and Susanne Slavick (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA).
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.
“Aratoi is honoured to exhibit this body of work, by a family of accomplished artists whose work spans the globe,” says Aratoi Director Susanna Shadbolt. “We are also pleased to publish a full-colour publication, with artwork by the four sisters, an essay by historian and theorist of contemporary art Katherine Guinness (USA), and a poem by Wairarapa kaimahi Rawiri Smith. The cover, pictured above, features an oil painting by Sarah Slavick.”
Family Tree Whakapapa opens on Saturday 12th December with an artist talk at 11am – with Madeleine present and her sisters joining online from the United States. The exhibition runs at Aratoi until 14 February 2021. It will then travel to Wallace Arts Centre in Auckland from 20 April - 13 June, 2021.
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 Whakapapa 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.
The artists have also made recordings of poems related to the exhibition’s themes; visitors may listen around a live tree in the gallery, while Madeleine Slavick’s poem ‘one leaf, one moment | Kotahi ake te rau, kotahi ake te wā’ acts as entrance and exit. (The translation is by Rawiri Smith.)
The artists acknowledge support from Masterton Creative Communities, as well as the City of Boston, College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Lesley University.
GALLERY STATEMENT:
FAMILY TREE WHAKAPAPA
In a 1940 poem, Bertolt Brecht asked:
What kind of times are they, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
In a 1995 poem, Adrienne Rich answered:
.....so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
Family Tree Whakapapa brings together the work of four sisters to ‘talk about trees.’
As curators, painters, photographers and writers, we portray trees in conditions in and outside of human care and conflict. Genealogical roots and botanical roots intertwine.
In its beauty and force, ‘nature’ is often regarded as benign and apolitical. We do not expect trees to assume editorial stances or embody ideologies. Whether bombed or irradiated, contained or marginalised, in underground union or standing in persistence, trees and their representations can offer solace and space—for the necessity of talking, listening and learning.
Family Tree Whakapapa offers both critical commentary and sensual delight in visualizing the tree as refuge and livelihood, consumed and consuming, under assault and triumphant, as historical record, and as harbinger of things to come.
PRESS LINKS:
Sisters add Whakapapa to work, Wairapapa Times-Age, May 5, 2021
Family Tree Whakapapa, CAA News Today, CWA Pick for April 2021, April 27, 2021
Family Tree Whakapapa, Love in the Time of Covid: A Chronicle of the Pandemic, December 2020
Monday Artpost, December 28, 2020
“Family Tree Whakapapa” PhotoForum, December 19, 2020
Becky Bateman, “Family Tree Whakapapa”, Wairarapa Midweek, December 16, 2020, p.14
Susanne Slavick, Tree of Life: Nepal, 2020, Gouache on archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper, 66 x 36 inches
Sources: Detail from photo by Simon de Trey White, World Wildlife Fund UK, Nepal firewood. Tree of Life design from English embroidered canvas, first half 17th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Slavick’s work pursues empathic unsettlement, combining images of incomprehensible destruction and the possibility of recovery, however elusive. For example, ‘Tree of Life’ carpet designs are painted over images of environmental devastation, from diverse cultural and environmental locales. These trees do not lie down; instead, they stand up in persistence. Whether inflicted by logging or global warming, deforestation knows no borders. The creative impulse motivating the painting, weaving and planting of trees is necessary for a global crisis that needs global solutions.
elin o’Hara slavick, A-Bombed Weeping Willow Tree, Hiroshima, 2019, Solarized silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 inches
Elin’s work in Family Tree Whakapapa is from the series After Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. Some of the exhibited works can be found in her monograph After Hiroshima (Daylight Books, 2013). During eight trips to Japan, she made cyanotypes of A-bombed artifacts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and irradiated matter from Fukushima, conjuring the shadows left by humans and things as a result of the blinding light and heat of the atomic bombs and the waves of the tsunami and radiation in Fukushima. Exposure is central to her project—both photographic exposures and exposure to radiation. Like humans, trees stand as witnesses, victims and survivors. Slavick also works in the darkroom with related and symbolic materials, x-ray film exposed to the lingering radiation in A-bombed artifacts, and rubbings of A-bombed surfaces, including some of the sixty trees that survived the A-bomb in Hiroshima.
Madeleine Slavick, Parking Lot Conversation, 2020, Archival inkjet prints, Diptych, each print 35.43 x 16.54 inches
This body of work speaks of Family, Tree, Whakapapa, and of the way I see: in juxtapositions, relationships.
A necessary connectedness.
We Are Never Alone.
I have called myself a tree.
An affirmation. To stand, endure, accord with any season, storm.
To be full of grace, resilience, wisdom.
Tree, tree, stand inside me.
Yet, often, nature, and the tree, is marginalised, contained, lessened.
We control, tame, fell, profit; trees become products, ornaments, bystanders.
Trees also stay trees, breathing, communicating, even in parking lots.
draw me a winter tree, the infinite delicate 為我畫一棵冬天的樹, 畫無限的柔美
silhouettes of black rivers and visible fingers 黑色河流與清晰手指的剪影
make a large winter head full of thought 巨大的, 冬天的頭顱,裝滿思想
This work was compiled in a difficult year – the massive struggle in Hong Kong, the menace in The White House, the climate crisis, the hate crisis, the pandemic...
Yes, I still want to call myself a tree.
加油 | we shall overcome | kia kaha
- Madeleine Slavick / 思樂維
Sarah Slavick, Elegy to the Underground, 2020, Oil on canvas, 56 x 44 inches
In producing oxygen, the trees above ground are critical for human survival. Sarah Slavick, in her Elegy to the Underground series, is particularly drawn to what happens below ground, especially the recent discoveries concerning latticed fungi or mycorrhizal networks. Through sharing resources and working together in complex and infinite pathways, alliances, and kinship networks, trees reach enormity, increasing their chances of survival and ours as well. These new insights into the hidden life of trees offer new strategies for protecting our own home and species. Fearing and mourning their heartbreaking loss, her watercolors and paintings constitute elegies, alternately acting as tributes and memorials to trees.