2007 – “What is Place”.
Site-specific installations by Wen-chih Wang (Taiwan) Jaffa Laam Lam (Hong Kong), Michael Belmore, Ej Lightman, Noel Harding & Persona Volare Collective at the Tree Museum, Gravenhurst, curated by Anne O’Callaghan.
Impossible Sites for Growth Artist: E. J. Lightman
“…E.J. Lightman’s Impossible Sites for Growth, an installational work mounted at The Tree Museum in the summer of 2007, sheds some light on our (mis)-understanding of a historic work like Spiral Jetty, the piece that set an early course for artists working directly with nature. Lightmans work addressed the issue at the heart of the Smithson dilemma and consequently encompasses issues relevant to any discussion of art that directly responds to the contexts of nature. Between two trees on a slope of land that leads down to a lake abutting The Tree Museum property, Lightman strung up two banners, back to back, each depicting a different photographic image of trees growing from rocky outcroppings of the Canadian Shield somewhere else on the site. Out here, in an admittedly reshaped version of the natural world, the view is overridden by, well, a view. Impossible Sites for Growth (which Lightman has stated was born of her fascination with trees that grew from the rocks, cracking open small fissures with their roots so they could somehow survive in a difficult place5) experientially displaces what we understand as being natural with what we recognize as decidedly artifactual: images of what it displaces, representations (photographs) of the thing, and not the thing (the natural world) itself… “
Gil McElroy, “New of Difference” The Tree Museum (The Tree Museum)