Landscape of the Earth of the White Oak

Alan Sonfist, artist

born 1946

Landscape of the Earth of the White Oak, 1969

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: lampblack; canvas; beeswax; resin

Dimensions:
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 183 x 445 cm
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 72 1/16 x 175 3/16 in

Credit line: Gift of Herbert and Paula Molner

Accession number: 1997.0353

Not on display

Add to portfolio

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

Terra Anima

The unstretched canvas on the floor of the gallery is part of the Surface Memory series of rubbings that environmental sculptor Alan Sonfist executed between 1969 and 1975. The work documents the roots of a tree in a New York forest of his childhood. Sonfist began this series at the same time as a photographic series, Myself Becoming One with the Tree, which depicts his own changing body embracing the changing trees of his childhood refuge. He has said:

Revisiting my childhood trees, I immediately caressed the White Oak.
As I caressed the trees, I saw their skin become mine.

Sonfist has differentiated himself from other earth artists by working in locations intimate to his past and not geographically isolated or destination-oriented. Serving as a microcosm of the artist’s larger concerns for ecology and the fragility of nature, this work demonstrates his ongoing documentation of repressed or forgotten histories—of trees as well as cities. Sonfist has called himself a visual archaeologist concerned with natural cycles, saying that rather than using a strictly “ecological model from a scientific point of view, or using pure history. It is like a palette. I see it as laying out facts, and then I make aesthetic decisions.”

Archive Label 2003:
This work is part of a series of rubbings that environmental sculptor Alan Sonfist executed between 1969 and 1975. The unstretched canvas was spread over the ground below an oak tree. The marks made from the rubbing map the earth and the tree’s roots. Oak trees hold particular significance for Sonfist. They provided him refuge as a child growing up in the south-central Bronx of New York City, where there was a virgin forest that has now been destroyed.

Serving as a microcosm of the artist’s central concerns for ecology and the fragility of nature, this work demonstrates Sonfist’s ongoing documentation of repressed or forgotten histories, of trees as well as cities. The scope of his thinking is far-reaching and often large in scale, to include the environmental evolution of urban landscapes.