We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

What you’re looking at is graphite trapped between layers of resin– carbon-based artifice entombed within the unforgiving sands of time. This is the work of Brooks Salzwedel, and it all seems to take place within the purgatorial swirling mists of a coniferous forest. Coupled with the comatose canopies of somnolent saplings, the only inhabitants of this cold gray place are towers of heavy-duty machinery that’s been left to rot by a populace long since vanished, Cormac McCarthy-style. The effect is simultaneously spooky and bewitching.

Salzwedel will be presenting new work at the Tinlark Gallery is Los Angeles, in a show opening Saturday, May 16th.

Over the past three weeks, a forest has crept into the Machine Project gallery in Los Angeles. A white-walled room in the middle of Echo Park’s stucco strip has been transformed into a veritable fertile valley. Conceived and installed by Christy McCaffrey and Sara Newey, the geniuses responsible for putting a speed metal guitarist performing under a gothic arch on the roof of LACMA, The Forest is an interactive simulated space that has hosted moonlit poetry readings, ghost stories, and birdsong identification workshops.

I took a blanket and a memory foam pillow to the forest last weekend for “Music to Nap By,” a profoundly relaxing performance by artist Brian Crabtree of the Catskill Mountains-based design team Monome. Staring up at the canopy of disconnected branches above, it was all too easy to block out the city and accept the artificial ambiance, reveling in the mechanical chirps and soothing bird calls that were accentuated by the accompaniment of Crabtree’s beautifully meandering tones. Check out The Forest before it gets cut down on Friday, April 24th.

Bred in the Pacific Northwest’s wooded wonderland and currently residing on a dilapidated farm in upstate New York, Kevin Hooyman has always felt strongly connected to the natural world. His paintings, illustrations and comics depict fantastic forests rich in psychedelic detail, anthropomorphic animals, and bearded shamans imparting deep wisdoms. Critiquing contemporary life from a perspective more transcendentalist than environmentalist, Hooyman’s images and stories use a detached sense of humor to break down everyday social interactions until they no longer seem to make sense or feel comfortable. Check out some pages from his latest book, Love to Live, on Arthur Magazine’s blog.