Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.
Bio: Tiffany Shlain, 54, Mill Valley (@tiffanyshlain)
Title of work: A Female Gaze Into History (2024).
Where to see it: “You Are Here” at Nancy Hoffman Gallery (520 West 27 St, New York), until Oct. 19.
Three words to describe this work: Trees. Witness. Humanity.
What was on your mind at the time: The exhilaration of seeing two mediums I love (filmmaking and tree ring sculptures) merge into one larger idea.
An interesting feature that’s not immediately noticeable: All my films are grounded in a deep history on a subject, and explore where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we want to go. In the last several years, I’ve applied this same thinking to physical artwork with my tree ring timeline sculptures. This same deep historical landscape is distilled onto timelines in works like Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring. It goes back 50,000 years, when goddesses were worshiped in almost every ancient civilization, to witch burnings, to the Dobbs decision, to this moment today, tracking the push and pull of progress.
I remember the exact moment this past year when I decided to project one of my experimental films about this feminist history onto one of my tree rings. When I first turned the projector onto the tree ring, it merged so many ideas I have explored in different mediums, into one experience. Tears welled in my eyes. This artwork combines so many years of thinking about interdependence and feminism onto one of our oldest technologies, the science of tree ring dating, dendrochronology. Each tree ring represents a year. These tree ring circles are visual representations of time. It both told a story with the rings and the images I projected onto it.
How the work reflects your practice as a whole: The visual of a film being projected onto the tree ring circles will now be a whole new area of exploration for me. I have many ideas I want to try next.
One song that captures the work’s essence: “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell.
