The Forest and The Sea — Five Car Garage

Group Show

The Forest and The Sea

Los Angeles | February 6 - March 2, 2021
_{Artists: Ashwini Bhat, Forrest Gander, Rema Ghuloum, Anja Salonen, Allegra Jones, L, Ross Caliendo, Charles Irvin, Max Jansons, John Bucklin, Rebecca Farr, Suné Woods, Justin Ortiz, Isabelle adams, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Max Maslansky, Amelia Lockwood, and Matt Goldberg}
_{Press: Artrabbit}

The Forest and The Sea is a group show featuring seventeen LA based artists and one poet to raise awareness and support the urgent call for CLIMATE CHANGE, in California and planet earth. Thinking globally but acting locally we are focussing on three local LA based environmental non profits who focus on trees (TreePeople) and seas (Waterkeeper and Habits of Waste) who show us how to be good stewards with common sense suggestions and ideas for every household.

In lieu of a press release we offer this poem by Pulitzer winning, eco poet Forrest Gander, "Postfire-Forest" is from his upcoming book "Twice Alive" to be published later this year.

^{Suite Number Seven from Meshell Ndegeocello on Vimeo.}

^{Suné Woods
Suite Number Seven, 2020
4 min. 28 sec.}

Suné Woods's commissioned contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello's project: Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin (A co-production of Bismillah, LLC & Fisher at Bard; co-commissioned by Live Arts Bard, UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre, and Festival de Marseille)

"Post-fire Forest"
by Forrest Gander

Shadows of shadows without canopy,
phalanxes of carbonized trunks and
snags, their inner momentum shorted-out.
They surround us in early morning
like plutonic pillars, like mute clairvoyants
leading a Sursum Corda, like the excrescence
of some long slaughter.
All that moves
is mist lifting, too indistinct to be called
ghostly, from scorched filamental
layers of rain-moistened earth. What
remains of the forest takes place
in the exclamatory mode. Cindered
utterances in a tongue from which
everything trivial has been volatilized,
everything trivial to fire. In a notch,
between near hills stubbled
with black paroxysm, we spot
a familiar sun, liquid glass globed
at the blowpipe’s tip. If this landscape
is dreaming, it must dream itself awake.
You have, everyone notes, a rare talent
for happiness. I wonder how
to value that, walking through wreckage.
On the second day, a black-backed
woodpecker answers your call, but we
search until twilight without finding it.