Respiro un bosque

Tatiana Arocha (Colombian, born 1974) is a New York-based artist who approaches Colombian flora from familial, indigenous, sacred, environmentalist, and postcolonialist perspectives. This exhibition, her museum debut, transports visitors to rural Colombia where she feels at home despite growing up in urban Bogota. Starting with intimately-scaled portraits of plants indigenous elders taught her about, the show features monumental “paintings” depicting the forest surrounding her father’s house and a river her son swam in. Arocha’s post-surrealism is realistic and fanciful; its pictorial density represents the tangled nature of the jungle and our complex relationship with it. Intricacy celebrates biodiversity; botanical minutiae evoke home. On our website, listen to a recording of her father (who teaches AfroColombian anthropology) explaining how plants talk to people. He calls her work “a dialogue with plants.”

Arocha’s artistic process is unique and complex. In Colombia, she collects leaves, bark, seed pods, and stalks of plantain, yucca, coca and rare plants. She dips them in local, natural pigments or makes rubbings of them to create textured lines on paper. This part of her process is difficult to control, like the rain forest itself. Back in New York, Arocha scans these lines then uses graphic design software to bend, shape, and overlap them. Thus avoiding direct reproduction methods like photography or printing, she starts with real leaves and winds up composing photo-realistic collages of leaves from her imagination. She reconstitutes and reinvents her botanical collection.

Her analog and digital process embodies her desire to balance local indigenous traditions with transnational realities. Arocha joins nature and art in fresh ways without losing the tension between them. That is, she is not simply reproducing nature with art. Nor is she just using nature as a paintbrush. Rather, she invents new artmaking techniques that encourage viewers to continually rethink the relationship between nature and culture. Black and white represent ash covering the rainforest canopy, the result of U.S. herbicide spraying used to eradicate Colombian plantations of coca despite its sacred uses. These colors also recall damage from coal mining and oil spills, essentially representing the endangered natural world in general. Furthermore, her palette refers to old engravings, suggesting that future generations may only get to see these landscapes in historical images. Gold stands for gold mining “scars” left on the rainforest, the devastating cost of society’s ever-increasing avarice. Gold serves as a reminder that the forest itself is the most valuable treasure.

Arocha amplifies the splendor of her home also to abate the negative stereotypes associated with Colombia. Her practice is deeply personal and respectful of indigenous forestry. Respiro un bosque aims to embolden children to teach adults to be curious about what people can learn from and make with plants. Ultimately, it reminds visitors to observe, cherish and preserve our Earth.