Floating Chronologies investigates dendrochronology, the study of mapping tree-rings, and the socio-ecological costs of institutionally displayed samples of tree cross-sections as examples of patriarchy’s “Man’s Conquest of Nature” narrative. Scientists use the term “floating chronology” to describe a tree-ring history whose beginning and end dates are unknown. My project transforms this concept into metaphor for the limits of our human-centered experience and a call to action to reevaluate our relationships with the non-human world.

This series offers alternative monuments to replace the museum tree. My monumental work, Time Traveler, is at the center of this series. Here, we do not find labels such as, “American Discovered,” pinned into spectacles of felled tree specimens. Instead, nature has its own perspective, and what might be a tree form transforms entirely into something mysterious, complex, and powerful in its own right. It becomes an energy field of swirling abstraction, a whirlpool of the eternal unconscious, suggestive of cosmic time and the shifting tectonic plates that form continents. Time becomes its own ecosystem, and we are collaborators, not controllers. 

This project was a finalist for the 2022 Frankenthaler Climate Art Award, an emerging art award fostering climate awareness, presented by Asia Society and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.