Metal Trees, Painted Brightly

In my first post, I talked about two types of art project I was going to look at in London, Ontario. The first was the carved wooden trunks in theTree Trunk tour. That first project, and its 18 trees, took over two months to complete and led to a little adventure and a new opportunity for my writing and photos over at Hamroad.com, and their blog about the growth of the tour.

I did still want to get to the second thing that was on my original list of 'art in London', and it is, in fact, another tree related installation. Its proper name is 'Metal Trees of the Carolinian Forest'. If you've been to downtown London, I probably don't have to say anything else to have you picture one or more of these trees in your head. If you haven't had the opportunity to see one, they look like this:

I've taken the other colour out of the image for emphasis, so there it is. There are a large number of these trees within a few blocks of each other in the downtown core. I could write a very long post and try to fit them all in, but I'm sure that wouldn't keep my interest very long, let alone anyone else's. I have had a lot of opportunities to see, read about, and think about public art in the last couple of months, and I'm going to break the columns up into catergories. Public art, especially made with public funds, is open to criticism from every taxpayer. I'm going to take a look at what might make a project more or less acceptable to the general public, and to the institution commissioning the art, and compare it to what has happened with the metal tree installation you see above. There's been no shortage of media coverage since these trees started popping up in the downtown core, believe me.

Check back in the next few days, and I'll start by looking at the first factor in an art installation, recognizability.

Where is this tree? That's the corner of Dundas and Ridout. You can find it, and every other tree in the installation on my Carolinian Trees Map. I've also started building a gallery of tree images that you can click on over to.