Slow Growing in the Time of Trees: A Tree and Mushroom Walk

Fee: FREE
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As part of Slow Growing in the Time of Trees, a C21 Collaboratory, Lynden land manager Robert Kaleta and artist-in-residence Yevgeniya Kaganovich lead a walk that explores the symbiotic relationship between trees and mushrooms.

In 2019, Kaganovich planted trees on the grounds for her tree intuits chair residency project. They have continued to grow in and out of the shape of chairs ever since. Slow Growing in the Time of Trees considers and contextualizes the time and materiality of the trees themselves, as well as the trees in relation to the human and non-human species that come into contact and engage in transformations with them. It focuses on the aesthetic possibilities of intermixing human and nonhuman processes in complex webs of entanglement inherent in durational processes. Throughout the growing season, Kaganovich and her collaborators will create speculative forms out of reused plastic bags and cardboard, inoculate grain and straw medium with three varieties of oyster mushroom spores, and situate the forms in and around the trees on the grounds of Lynden Sculpture Garden, documenting the ways in which these cultivated fruiting bodies develop and distort Kaganovich’s fabricated forms.

For the walk, Kaleta will tell the story of Lynden’s trees, discuss the physiological changes that trees go through each season, and explain how each species fits into the urban forest ecosystem. Kaganovich will identify naturally occurring mushroom species and highlight some of the growing sculptures in tree intuits chair. She will be joined by her Collaboratory collaborators, Lisa Moline, Lane Hall, and Jim Charles, who have been intervening in the tree-mushroom symbiosis by introducing fruiting myceliated sculptures in proximity to her sculptures.

About the Participants

Robert Kaleta, Lynden’s land manager, has worked for more than a decade in the field of ecological restoration, and has spent almost a lifetime enjoying what nature has to offer.

Artist-in-residence Yevgeniya Kaganovich is a Belarus-born, Milwaukee-based artist, whose hybrid practice encompasses jewelry and metalsmithing, sculpture and installation. Yevgeniya received an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a BFA in Metal/Jewelry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yevgeniya has been an active art practitioner since 1992, exhibiting her work nationally and internationally. Her work has received numerous awards and has been published widely.

Yevgeniya’s interest in craft scholarship and pedagogy lead her to undertake curatorial projects, panel and symposium organizing, and other contributions to contemporary craft discourse. Yevgeniya has worked as a Designer/Goldsmith at Peggie Robinson Designs, Studio of Handcrafted Jewelry in Evanston, Illinois and has taught Metalsmithing at Chicago State University, Chicago, Illinois, and Lill Street Studios, Chicago Illinois. Currently Yevgeniya is a Professor in the Department of Art and Design, Peck School of the Arts, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, heading a thriving Jewelry and Metalsmithing Area with a graduate and undergraduate programs.

C21 is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee College of Letters & Sciences Center for 21st Century Studies. C21 believes that the complex challenges we face in the 21st century are best met through collaborations across areas of expertise and experience, and that the humanities are a vital part of addressing these challenges.Collaboratory funding is an opportunity to bring together teams of scholars across disciplines, across university and community partnerships, and across emerging and established scholars (students / staff / faculty) to inspire the generation of new ideas.