In the short film Dendrostalkers, the view is from the driver’s seat of a car curving along a dirt road through a forest at night. The trees are thick and dark, then give way to a clearing, a pile of fresh lumber. The narration speaks of foreboding. The car stops, and something springs from the pile of dead trees, a new limb, animated, making shapes in the air. It’s the next step in evolution, maybe a dispatch from the future. It’s an art project that has something to say about our relationship to the forest now.
Dendrostalkers, artist Julia Oldham writes, is about “trees that are evolving to transcend the three-dimensional world in order to escape human destruction. Combining footage of clear cuts in the Coburg Hills with hand drawn and digital animation,” the short film “takes us on a drive through a forest peppered with trees behaving strangely: they grow and regress, break down into geometric abstractions, and disappear into black holes.” The plot: Disregarding “an emergency warning from the National Forest Service, two sisters attempt to film higher dimensional trees called ‘dendrotopes’ to post them on an online forum. They find themselves in competition with a stranger whose username is @dendrostalker1992 and taking risks to acquire the most daring footage.”
As ominous and uncanny as it is, though, Dendrostalkers isn’t a horror movie. It’s about the world evolving beyond us. For some that might be terrifying. For others it might be beautiful. The distinct possibility of the latter connects Oldham’s piece to the rest of the show: “Forest Bathing,” a show curated by Alex Santana and featuring the work of 26 artists exploring our connection to nature, and how deepening that connection can affect our lives.
“Forest bathing is a deep mode of relaxation that encourages humans to spend long periods of time in forest ecosystems, usually integrating acts of walking, sitting, and meditating,” an accompanying note states. “When practiced frequently and intentionally, this deeply embodied reflective state can also increase human life expectancy, as being outdoors is generally synonymous with enhanced well-being. In contrast with hiking, a physical exercise that activates our nervous system and can be done while thinking about other things, forest bathing is more about being, in acute awareness of one’s environment and our relationship to it.”
