bone tree

This series began with an exploration of L-systems or the Lindenmayer system, a formal grammar most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, introduced and developed in 1968 by the Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist Aristid Lindenmayer. L-System rules are recursive in nature, which in turn leads to self-similarity and thereby fractal like forms that mimic branching patterns in the natural world. Bone Tree is not modelled on any algorithms or programs. Each piece has been constructed with manually placed layers of video stills generated using video-feedback.

I am interested in the inversion of the uncanny. Where Freud held that the uncanny is very often neither supernatural nor particularly mysterious in its origin, but rather, completely familiar, I am interested in working with material that is quite extraordinary in its origins, and its subsequent making into the familiar, the almost mundane. Yet, because of the nature of its origins, it retains a quality of the uncanny. The tree is not a tree, it could be bone, or cartilage, but again, bone or cartilage digitally generated. The result is a feeling of their being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar.

”  ‘The uncanny’, writes Freud, ‘is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ Hovering between the ‘old and long familiar’ real and the unreal, their existence owing to digital and metaphorical narcissistic doubling, and the ambiguity of their status both as the subject and object of both the video cameras and the viewers’ gaze, are some of the many possible Freudian readings Devasher’s ‘trees’ lend themselves to.” Hemant Sareen

Untitled I from the Bone Tree series | Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper | 34 x 66 inches | 2014

Untitled II from the Bone Tree series | Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper | 34 x 66 inches | 2014

Untitled III from the Bone Tree series | Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper | 45 x 66 inches | 2014