The Trees of Aspen

Sonfist conceived of his sculpture Trees of Aspen as a monument to the damage, and particularly the loss of tree-life, due to forest fire, drought and other climate-related environmental change in the American southwest. Created from native and natural materials—charred pine and aspen, earth, and other organic materials—the physical presence of this sculpture expresses a very direct relationship to the land. Meanwhile, the image of these ghostly and blackened trees recalls more generalized representations of destruction and barrenness.

Sonfist came of age in the 1960s, along with other conceptually-oriented New York-based artists, such as Robert Smithson. While the focus of his work has been on the landscape, unlike other artists interested in the environment, much of Sonfist’s best-known work has considered the effacement of natural histories by urban development. Though Trees of Aspen draws explicit connections to Southwestern US, this project also relates to his major public work Time Landscape (proposed 1965, realized 1978), in which he created a 25-by-40-foot patch of forest in the midst of Greenwich Village, New York: restoring as closely as possible the mix of plants that would have been found in Manhattan prior to the arrival of the Europeans.