Life with Joshua Trees” at MOAH – Art and Cake

“Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees” September 7 – December 29, 2024
Presented by Getty PST ART
Digital Program

By Betty Ann Brown
“Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees” is a scientific, poetic, and aesthetically rich exhibition that opened in early September at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster. The expansive exhibition was expertly curated by Sant Khalsa and associate curator Juniper Harrower. Both women are artists whose oeuvre has focused on environmental issues, so they are excellent choices to organize the “Desert Forest” exploration of the existential threats of climate change and human incursions on the desert ecology.

Khalsa and Harrower are joined in this exploration by sixty diverse artists, from historic masters like Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) to contemporary Los Angeles artists. Most of the featured artists are photographers and/or videographers, but the exhibition also includes paintings, drawings, installations, and mixed media works. Here are just a few examples.

Marthe Aponte’s Portrait of a Joshua Tree presents a light box shaped like a silhouette of a Joshua Tree, with sparkles of lights coming through the tiny holes in her characteristic picote surface. It shimmers like a jewel on the second floor of the museum.

Around the corner, Stevie Love’s Rebirth is also based on the silhouette of a Joshua Tree. Love covers the erratic biomorphic shape with beads, sequins, and glitter. Then she sculpts thick paint on the end of each branch to represent the clusters of spiky leaves there.

          Catherine Ruane’s Dance Me to the Edge is a group of graphite and charcoal drawings on paper mounted on board. A large disc depicting desert flora is surrounded by twelve smaller discs depicting details of desert plants and, at the top, a single moth fluttering against a velvety black sky. The overall circular format combined with the twelve small discs can be seen as representing a clock…and if so, it symbolizes the fleeting time of environmental destruction.

          Associate curator Juniper Harrower’s Ecologies of Care is an installation is shaped like a house, with walls composed of translucent fabric. The gauze-like “walls” are covered with desert images and objects. Elegant and poetic, Ecologies of Care reminds us of the desert’s biological diversity…and thus of how many plants and creatures are as threatened as the Joshua Tree.

          Curator Sant Khalsa’s Vishuddha (Self Portrait) is a photograph created in 1994 (underscoring the fact that she has been concerned about the environmental deterioration in the desert for over thirty years.) Vishuddha refers to the Hindu concept of the throat chakra. Khalsa inserts a photograph of the Joshua Tree into her open mouth. Viewers will be reminded that we are one with all living beings, in this case Joshua Trees…which means that as they are threatened with destruction, we too are threatened.

          In addition to tradition static works, “Desert Forest” also includes several videos and interactive pieces. Among the videos works is Jennifer Gunlock’s Joshua Tree, Series VII, a video imagining of the destruction of the desert environment caused by human incursion. Gunlock also included a digital collage of one of the trees surrounded by fantastical wooden scaffolding.

          In this short essay, I have only discussed six artists…and, again, there are ten times that number in “Desert Forest.” An integral part of the Getty’s “PST: Art & Science Collide” project, the MOAH exhibition is well worth not just one visit but several. Lucky for us, it is open until the end of December, so we can do just that.

Photos Courtesy Sant Khalsa