Introduction

The urge to personify trees is an old one. From the Middle Ages’ Green Man to the American habit of naming trees things like George Washington and Father of the Forest, trees have served as objects of veneration and identification. Artists have long given this practice concrete form. In the nineteenth century, for example, Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt produced arboreal compositions which testify to a human search for personal and cultural identity in the woods. Significantly, they frequently shifted from the horizontal format traditionally associated with landscapes to a vertical format frequently referred to as a "portrait." At the same time, British photographers were being commissioned to make images of the trees on estate grounds; these were bound into albums just like family pictures.

Marcella Hackbardt continues this tradition, but alters it. Instead of offering an image of the reliable, benevolent and respected Old Oak or Ancient Elm, her trees are fragile, thorny, and abused. In the place of an endless parade of remote patriarchs, she gives us nurturing fathers, forests of mothers and spindly young couples struggling for light. Some of her trees hold children up to the sky, bending without breaking in the manner of an ideal parent. Others seem to scream and flash, reminding us of species like the Giant Redwoods, which must burn before it can produce seedlings. Many of her trees have been cut—either literally chopped down or severed by the photographer—testing our faith in nature’s ability to persevere and regenerate. One image compares the fallen trunks in the foreground with the house of a woman whose age and dementia have prevented her from fixing its sags and cracks. Is the end of her Family Tree, or is it the end of traditional ideas of the family tree? In another photograph, Divided Self, a delicate leaf has been cut in half, but this act of destruction has not diminished its exquisite beauty. Some of the human bodies in this exhibition are similarly torn and broken as they struggle to regenerate, often with imperfect results.

These photos reveal that the domestication of trees—and by association, the domestication of people--is a violent, perverse, and often touching thing. I find myself moved by Hardwoods, in which the same people who have cut trees down have built houses for the vulnerable planks. This reaction is magnified by Hackbardt’s explanation that this wood was processed by small Amish mills from old trees. In Forest Home, on the other hand, the trees brought into the house become a pale and disturbing reflection of the natural bounty visible right outside. Does this faded and frenzied forest symbolize the family that gathers around this pristine table, also a pale imitation of wood, or is this a kitschy send-up of the human longing to control the uncontrollable? It is the viewer’s to decide, for Hackbardt’s trees are less role models than mirrors, reflecting the good and bad, the joyous and the painful of family life that is familiar to us all.

-Elizabeth Hutchinson

Elizabeth Hutchinson is an Assistant Professor of Art at Barnard College.