Photo courtesy Museum of Wisconsin Art
Suzanne Rose - Broken but Blooming - Cherry Tree
Suzanne Rose - Broken but Blooming - Cherry Tree
Photographer Suzanne Rose is in love with trees, but not in the environmentalist “tree-hugger” sense. She is more an admirer of their architecture, their stateliness and their ability, she says, to reflect the human condition. But she is disturbed by trees—or any part of nature—that bear the scars of humankind’s environmental recklessness. Such damage, she believes, reflects the carelessness and lack of awareness inside us all which, in turn, is endangering the planet.
“Blind Spot: To Pass Among Them,” her exhibit of 30-plus large format black-and-white photographs that opens Dec. 4 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s gallery at Saint Kate-The Arts Hotel in Downtown Milwaukee, shows trees and their surroundings in both their glory and their agony. The images offer abject examples of the detritus and debris characterizing the midwestern Anthropocene, the geological age during which human activities have had significant and often negative impact on the Earth.
The exhibit’s examples are many. A beautifully plumed maple tree of significant age reaches its branches high overhead toward the sunlight, only to have its crown riven by a huge gash that makes way for utility company power lines to pass through. Hunting blinds, also known as deer stands, hide among the branches of other trees, representing another form of natural defilement. Mounds of harvested wood, salt or other commodities exhibit human consumption as well as the dissipation of resources occurring in counterpoint to natural environmental growth.
Feeling the Connection
“I’m not a landscape photographer, but a concept photographer and I have always focused on things relative to my own narrative,” says Rose, a Door County resident who walks miles with her dog daily through the local woods, hills and fields in her search for subjects. “I started seeing damaged trees and I found them extraordinarily beautiful. They were cathartic and I started photographing them because I felt connected to them.”
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The exhibit represents the humankind’s tendency to take care of its own needs first despite the impact of its actions, the “blind spot” to which the title refers. But it also reflects nature’s resilience in the face of such abuse and its continued effort to withstand the physical assaults to whatever degree it can, Rose says. Taken together, those two aspects define what’s going on inside of us as well as outside with the environment, she adds.
“Gandhi said, ‘We are but a mirror of the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.’”
For Rose, the exhibit is very much a personal mission, one she hopes will help viewers being to examine their own situations.
“The project for me was to ultimately understand myself and where I stand in the bigger picture,” she says. “Taking stock in ourselves may be the only way to find solutions to environmental problems.”
Artists play a special role in alerting the public to many of these issues, Rose explains. “The conversation that artists create with their work can make a difference. We don’t have a front-row seat to oil drilling, but some of the mounds I photographed were fracking sands, and that makes me part of the problem. How do I help flip the script? It starts in my own back yard.”
Blind Spot: To Pass Among Them runs Dec. 4, 2021, through Feb. 10, 2022, at Saint Kate–The Arts Hotel, 139 E. Kilbourn Ave. The exhibition’s celebration party will be held Dec. 9 from 5 to 7 p.m. Admission is free. To register, visit wisconsinart.org.
