COVID-19
I think a lot about trees when I go walking in the city as in the country, and I thought more about them while looking at Blind Spot, a series of photographs by Suzanne Rose on view this fall at Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, in a show originally scheduled for last spring. Rose’s pictures are as much landscapes as they are portraits of individual trees that tower, bend, reach, and sometimes break. Though shot with a digital camera and printed with contemporary methods, her prints nod pleasurably to old photography with their rounded corners, deep blacks and whites, and the almost total absence of human activity. Almost total, but not quite, and it’s those moments where the Anthropocene intervenes that mark Blind Spot as critical rather than nostalgic, about now as well as then. The trees, it comforts me to note, bear it all rather well, taking an adjacent field or a road as an opportunity to grow wider, a power line overhead as a prompt to sport an eccentrically split crown. The trees shall inherit the earth.
—Lori Waxman 2020-11-13 11:01 AM