On view September 19 - October 17; open during all events; Thursdays 4:30-7pm, Sundays noon-4pm; or email info@rhizomedc.org to make an appointment
LANDSCAPE PORTRAITS: Color Studies from Southeast Alaska
During the summers of 2017 and 2019, I joined two friends from Southeast Alaska to seek out the last stands of ancient trees on Taan Island (also called Prince of Wales Island). This island has the highest density of clearcutting anywhere on the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest. Like so many of the places we call home, Taan Island is a place sometimes viewed by outsiders as ugly, blighted and broken. Heavily scarred by extractive industry, Taan Island can be a hard place to love unless you live there. Locals say you can’t go a mile without encountering a clear cut forest. But despite damages from the last 60 years of industrial logging, there are still stands of cedar, spruce and hemlock trees growing uninterrupted since the last ice age. These paintings grew out of a shared effort to bear witness to this fractured landscape. They are a record of my time as a visitor, of the time we spent bushwhacking, of the conversations I had with friends, fishermen, conservationists, community leaders and elders. They are a portrait of a place that some have decided isn’t worth a closer look.
Categorizing the objects by color allows me to show the human and more-than-human all together on the same page, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and the natural world. I thought about how this organization—as well as my decision to leave the objects unnamed—presents a challenge to traditional western taxonomy. I thought about our common ancestors, how we are all made up of essentially the same things (water, carbohydrate chains, oxygen, color). How a landscape expresses color. How losing a species of mud shrimp to extinction also means the loss of a particular shade of blue. How a clear cut forest is a place drained of its color. How these portraits are a record of all my looking, at a particular place in a moment in time.
Mara Menahan is a botanical illustrator, an artist and student of the natural world. She began her career at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. as the in-house botanical illustrator. Since then, she has worked to bear witness to threatened landscapes across North America. Her paintings are a record of time: how slowly she moved across a landscape, the time she spent looking, and the time we live in, the anthropocene. maramenahan.xyz
