| It was around the time the movie The Happening came out when the interview with artist Roxy Paine took place. He had just returned from Art Basel earlier in June, where his latest piece, Inversion, was on view at the entrance to the fair. The Happening, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is about how nature, specifically plants, evolved and started spreading chemicals that made humans commit suicide. While the movie did not inspire the artist, the conflict between nature and man is obviously reminiscent in Paine’s work. Inversion, for example, is a tree made of stainless steel, standing upside down, reaching the sky with its roots at the top and all its leafless branches touching the ground. | 
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Catherine Y. Hsieh
Roxy Paine, Conjoined, 2007. Madison Square Park, New York City. Courtesy of the artist.It was around the time the movie The Happening
came out when the interview with artist Roxy Paine took place. He had
just returned from Art Basel earlier in June, where his latest piece, Inversion, was on view at the entrance to the fair. The Happening,
directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is about how nature, specifically
plants, evolved and started spreading chemicals that made humans commit
suicide. While the movie did not inspire the artist, the conflict
between nature and man is obviously reminiscent in Paine’s work. Inversion,
for example, is a tree made of stainless steel, standing upside down,
reaching the sky with its roots at the top and all its leafless
branches touching the ground. It’s rare to see a piece of art in a magnitude of 6,000 pound and 40 feet tall, which is how big Inversion is. It’s even rarer to see something this size in the form of a tree made from stainless steel. Reflecting its surroundings on its surface, this familiar yet blatantly strange creature seemed to have descended from outer space, or from some futuristic fantasy in one’s dreams.Inversion certainly turned heads at Art Basel in Europe. Its predecessors, Conjoined, Defunct, and Erratic did the same in New York City’s Madison Square Park last year. Conjoined are two trees with every single one of their branches intertwined, making it almost impossible to distinguish which branch belongs to which tree, while Defunct is a tree that has wilted, surrendering its dying trunk to all sorts of fungi. Erratic is a replica of a monstrous boulder carried by a glacier far away from its origin. For seven and a half months (May 15, 2007-December 31, 2007) the three sculptures occupied the park, watching over New Yorkers during their weekday lunch breaks or weekend afternoon outings. While Inversion’s audience—artists, galleriests, curators—was more art-savvy, the audience of Conjoined, Defunct, and Erratic might be more attentive to their own daily routines and less knowledgeable in art. But Paine’s works emanate the same overarching aura to connoisseurs or dabblers alike. As part of public art, his installations serve as ornaments in the environment where they’re located. They beautify and give purpose to a place that has none. In fact, Paine’s work is so site-specific one can’t help wondering if it would still be as compelling without a backdrop of nature.
One of Paine’s trees, Misnomer, helps answering the question. Misnomer, a stainless-steel work on view in 2005, stood 12 feet and 4 inches tall on James Cohan Gallery’s wooden floor against a white wall. The visual sensation viewers get from Inversion, Conjoined, Defunct, or Erratic is completely missing in this picture, perhaps because of the shrunken scale, or the absence of nature. Apparently, the chemistry between Paine’s work and an outdoor setting is irreplaceable. This chemistry is evident in his very first tree, Imposter. The stainless-steel tree was placed in a forest in Knislinge, Sweden back in 1999. The tree’s welded surface mirrored its neighboring counterparts that had real trunks and real leaves—an authentic part of nature facing an alien, confronting its legitimacy. “[Imposter] was this entity that was trying to pass itself off,” Paine said. “But of course it was painfully obvious what it was….”
This underlying irony has always interested the artist. To portray these conceptual ramifications, Paine chooses the tree as his subject. Trees, as a vital part of nature, seem to be the perfect vehicle for the artist’s idea of language and translation. “I think of the tree in the same way as this kind of conveyer,” Paine said. “The branches, the trunk—they’re conveying the energy from the leaves down, and conveying the energy from the roots up. It’s this kind of massive exchanger. I like drawing those parallels between the industrial exchange of energy and the organic exchange.” The shift between the inorganic and the organic enables Paine’s work to speak to viewers in a way so silent yet adamant that they stop to ponder their own connection with earth.
Whether it’s in the depths of a forest, in an artificial green space, or before a modern glass skyscraper, the sculptures’ shiny metallic facade cannot conceal the fact that they are synthetic. Yet the impeccable resemblance of Paine’s works to the actual subjects brings the installations face to face with nature—the very model they mimic. One prominent feature of Paine’s sculptures is that nothing is cast. “I could be just having mold taken on a real tree, casting it in metal, and putting it out. But that is not at all what I’m interested in,” Paine said. “I’m interested in this awkward translation between this organic language of the tree and the industrial language.” The heavily welded surface denotes human vestiges, which contribute to the surroundings these sculptures are in. Distinction between nature and technology seems to be dissolving from the weather-stricken exteriors of Erratic, to the mushroom-covered trunk of Defunct, to the leafless entangled branches of Conjoined. They are about decay, about nature, about technology’s involvement in nature’s system. Mostly, they are about man’s place in the natural order. Paine’s works pose a jarring contrast between material and shape. By juxtaposing a natural form with an inorganic substance, Paine reminds viewers how human beings are threatening the environmental mechanism with their exploitation of natural resources. “I regard [nature and technology] as neither compatible nor incompatible,” Paine said. “In a way, industry is…humanity, and humanity is nature…we just happen to be a product of nature or an element of nature that is sometimes intent on destroying every other part of nature.” Paine’s work examines a human compulsion to break things down, to distill, to understand, to change, and to rearrange. “I see Inversion as a kind of reflecting of that rearrangement,” Paine said. “That compulsion to completely alter something once we have broken it down. I see it as reflecting how we are really fucking with nature on a fundamental level at this point….”
People have become more and more comfortable in the simulated world than in the real one. Like what Paine said about Erratic, something that feels at home in its situation, but is completely foreign to the situation, his works always seem so at ease wherever they are placed—from a Swedish forest to a man-constructed park in a metropolitan landscape. “I’m interested in a displacement idea,” Paine said. “In something that feels integrated but is, in reality, quite foreign.” He provides a dichotomy of man vs. nature, critiquing on the overwhelming impact of technology on the ecosystem. His commentary, however, does not offer a remedy. “…I’m not really about single messages,” Paine said. “I’m much more interested in [my work] being a point of contemplation and a point of contradiction, and to be kind of a meditation on decay, industry, and nature, and our relationship to the natural world….” Paine scrutinizes humanity’s ability to manipulate natural laws by exercising his own. A human’s attempt to the eternal, Paine’s work serves as a memento of the inseparable interrelations between machine and nature, man and earth.
