Graft, Droid Shots, Washington, D.C., June 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All Rights Reserved.

A half mile from the U.S. Capitol in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art stands a 45-foot high by 45-foot wide stainless steel tree, gleaming in the sun. Graft (2008–2009) by American sculptor Roxy Paine (part of the “Dendroid” series) is made from more than 8,000 components and weighs 16,000 pounds. When I leaned against her trunk and grazed the steeled bark, I was reminded of Deborah Butterfield‘s later work in which she adopted junk metal and industrial materials such as barbed wire, pipes, and fencing into her horse sculptures. She first composed Woodrow (1988) in pieces of wood, disassembled the sculpture, and reassembled the horse in bronze. The tension between the natural world sculpted in modern materials speaks to the time in which we live—tethered to our electronics, constantly seeking ground.

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Roxy Paine was born in 1966 in New York and studied at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York. The artist has shown his other Dendroids on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), in the Olympic Sculpture Park (Seattle), and outside the Museum of Modern Art (Fort Worth, Texas). Read more about his work at his website.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 15th, 2015
-related to: WRITING TOPIC – TREES

Filed under: Art, Nature, On the Road, Place Tagged: artists as muse, Deborah Butterfield, Dendroids, famous trees, Graft, metal sculpture, National Gallery of Art, Roxy Paine, sculptors, Travel, trees, Washington D.C., Woodrow