April 16, 2021 | Jonathan Goodman
Curated by Nina Mdivani at NARS, the Brooklyn-based art, and residency center, “This Is Not My Tree” is a complex, unusually interesting group show based on the interaction of nature with the changing, often artificially established geopolitical boundaries we now encounter. It is a group show–fourteen participants (only a few can be mentioned in this text)–meant to comment on the complexity of transported species and the often tragic consequences of political change; several artists from Israel are represented as well as artists from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and Georgia. The exhibition, a bit constrained by the small space the work has been placed in, is itself an example of our preoccupation with boundaried sites in which species transported from far away now inhabit places they were foreign to only a generation or two ago. While there are too many artists to individually characterize here, it is clear that they all share the hope that art can unify and even transform the troubling, mixed mosaic of contemporary politics and ecological decay they are addressing.
