Looking Up
Post Covid19 Naturalism in Chana Cromer’s Tree Portraits
Exhibit | Marie Gallery & Epsten Gallery | Jerusalem & Kansas City
April 20th - May 21st, 2022 & April 27th - August 7th, 2023
Chana Cromer, a Jerusalem based artist, processed the complexities of reconnecting with the world after the pandemic lockdowns in a series of tree portraits. Calling on herself and the viewer to change perspective and look up, she ventures out into the urban ‘forest’, away from her main creative field of textile art, and immerses herself in a naturalistic study trees.
Following the success of the original run of the exhibition, she was invited to show her pieces at the Epsten Gallery in Kansas City. ‘Still Looking Up’, the exhibition’s second iteration required further curatorial adjustments that took account the change in the body of works and gallery space.
Time.
3 Months
Role.
Curator | Graphic Designer
From 'About the Color Green'
We ourselves are first tender green.
Then we wizen.
We begin green and then we learn.
We turn dark and sharp in knowledge
losing our youthful damp sappiness….
a
But in dreams we remember
the carpet at our feet
that once grew chartreuse,
that once was lime
and granny smith apple fresh.
fro
Our winter heart still holds
that temporary
shade of green,
that green
that is the freshness of fresh.
Chana Cromer | 2022
"Green is the prime color of the world,
and that from which its loveliness arises."
Pedro Calderon de la Barca , ‘La Selva Confusa’, 1623
At the center of ‘Looking Up’ is a series of tree portraits. These paintings are different responses offered by Chana Cromer, a multi-disciplinary artist, to the search she embarked on at the beginning of the winter. After months of self confinement under the shadow of the pandemic, she ventures from her home out to the urban nature and gazes upwards to the treetops. This change of perspective allows a reevaluation and focus on what commonly evades our attention. The colors of leaves and branches, their relationship to the sky and clouds flittering between them, the play of light and shadow and the tree’s character in relationship to the city around it; all these spark Cromer’s creativity and focus her portraiture.
This is not the first time that nature, its color and the shift of perspective upwards is expressed in Cromer’s work. ‘Renewal’ is a series of collages that combine nature photography and acrylic paint. Here the impotence to venture into nature is a different crisis, the Carmel Disaster where a huge fire rampaged through the forest, killing 44. Cromer examines the tension between the destruction left by the fire and nature’s effusive powers of renewal and regrowth.
Having finished the tree portrait series, Cromer continues the discourse in her main creative field - textile art. She experiments with what happens at the intersection of the materiality and layering of printed fabrics and naturalistic elements and colors. As if trying to crack the code and understand what creates the experience of a canopy, she researches the relationships of pattern, color and light.
The exhibition gathers the portraits of solitary trees and creates a pseudo forest inside the gallery. The viewer is invited to wander in the forest and join in the search for a new perspective - a sensitive examination of the nature that surrounds us.
Skin / Light, 2004 Silk screen, metallic pigments, organza brocade | 100 x 120 cm
