Moving a Tree

source: averylawrence

In Moving a Tree I create a surreal, yet familiar world in which I push physical limits as my characters engage in absurd tasks.

In this movie, the protagonist fells a decaying walnut by hand, carries the logs on his back to the top of a nearby hill, and reconstructs the pieces into a tree-like monument.

Drawing inspiration from early cinema and contemporary performance artists, I craft this visual yarn with moments from my family history in mind. The personal stories, implicit in the narrative, enhance the sense of sincerity and intimacy in the film. Moving a Tree re-presents the story of my maternal grandfather’s struggle with dementia and how my grandmother came to cope with the gradual deterioration of her husband’s mind and body.

I present the film in a carefully curated environment to heighten the immediacy of the work for the viewer. The film, shown on large, flat-screen television, is surrounded by custom wallpaper, character drawings and objects from each production.
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source: averylawrence

Avery Lawrence is an artist living in New Orleans, LA.

averymlawrence@gmail.com

Avery Lawrence was born into a loving, supportive family in Charlottesville, VA. Growing up in Charlottesville had a significant impact on his artistic career. His family always encouraged him to pursue a career in the arts. He participated in multiple arts programs in the Charlottesville City School system, including a five-week Virginia Governor’s School residency art program at the University of Richmond. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 with a degree in Visual Studies. After graduating, He illustrated a fine press edition of the Iliad and Odyssey. He learned how to screen print wallpaper at Flavor Paper. In November of 2011, he designed and painted a 5000 square foot mural in Charlottesville, VA. He currently lives and maintains a studio in New Orleans.
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source: artvoicesmagazine

In the art world it could be considered cheesy to embellish a personal story too much,” Avery Lawrence says as we discuss the performance video piece and installation he’ll be opening in March at Heiner Contemporary in Washington, D.C.. “But in Moving a Tree, it was really important. It helped me understand the whole thing and put it into a context.

We’re talking in Lawrence’s new studio space in New Orleans. The space is not only new for Lawrence, who has recently resettled here, but new for New Orleans. The monstrosity of a building — a former paper mill located in the 7th ward — was purchased by New Orleans signature artist James Michalopoulos, and he is converting it into relatively affordable artist spaces. The sense of raw wood and pulverized cement is good for an artist who incorporates the formation of his art into the art itself. Take Lawrence’s video performance piece, The Interment of Three Parises. In the video, available for viewing on his website (averylawrence.com), Lawrence steps into frame carrying his props. In a green field he opens an eight-foot ladder. On his back he carries what looks like a cross between an adding machine and a toilet paper dispenser, from which will unravel a 24-foot reel of images of Paris Hilton, which Lawrence himself printed. Lawrence tucks the end of the roll into a paper shredder stationed at the foot of the ladder. He then climbs the ladder as the shredder consumes Hilton’s repeated and elongated image. When the shredder is finished gobbling, when there are no more Paris Hiltons left to consume, Lawrence gathers up his props and exits the frame with Chaplinesque solemnity.

“It’s about encapsulating how one does it,” Lawrence says of his tendency to incorporate the conception into the performance. “In some respects I don’t want it to be magic.”
Art is work and takes effort; sweat is an integral ingredient, and that should be incorporated too. Consider Marina Abramovic when she invites pedestrians to squeeze between two naked bodies. Imbedded within the notion of human relations – and human and artist relations – is the raw unavoidable press of soft skin, a bit of flab, and the funk of human odor. Abramovic’s nakedness touches upon the purity of performance itself. Props are always props. Strip away a few effects and what is left is the performer, human intention, a stunt devised to consider, which may contain valuable ideas, but which is composed, essentially, of the artist. Lawrence is such a artist.

The central act of Moving a Tree is Lawrence taking down a walnut tree piece by piece then walking it piece by piece up a hill, re-erecting it inside a scaffolding, which is then removed so that what one is left with is a sculptural tree-like thing. It is a tremendous endeavor. While scouting for locations, Lawrence went to his grandparents’ property just outside Charlottesville, Virginia (where Lawrence was raised), found the perfect tree and, as he explains, the whole thing became much more personal.

“My grandfather passed away after five years of struggling with dementia after a stroke. The personal history idea was that I was going to play my grandparents, and the whole film was going to be a homage to them. So the first character I play is wearing a business suit for my grandfather. He climbs a tree and cuts it down with a handsaw. The act of destroying the tree reflects his dementia. He started doing things we couldn’t account for. It was a little confusing, so that act is confusing. Then I switch into the tennis whites outfit that’s supposed to represent my grandmother. She picks up the pieces of the tree and puts them back together again.”

Moving a Tree was commissioned by Margaret Heiner as part of the (e)merge art fair, the first hotel room art fair in Washington, D.C. After (e)merge, Lawrence took the piece to Scope in Miami during Art Basel. It will soon serve as half of Lawrence’s upcoming solo show at Heiner Contemporary in March of 2012. In each incarnation the seven minute film of Moving a Tree serves as part of an entire installation. Within, Lawrence incorporates a physical performance (in the past: Lawrence on a treadmill, dressed in tennis whites and carrying a log on his back) as well as two by three-foot illustrations of the characters. The entire exhibit is lined with wallpaper designed and printed by Lawrence, which incorporates the tree and characters in a repeated, intertwining pattern. “I want [the video] to be more than something that’s quickly consumed and discarded,” Lawrence explains. “When there’s a room that goes along with it, when there’s wallpaper that complements it, when there are these monumental drawings, it helps the viewer pause for a moment and make all the connections. The video can stand alone, but I think the presentation of that video projected in a movie theatre would be a very different thing. If that happened I would want to set up the wallpaper in the lobby, or something like that, because I don’t want it to be just a YouTube video.”

Moving a Tree

Moving a Tree connects Lawrence and viewers to his maternal grandparents, while the other half of the upcoming Heiner show, a piece called Arranging Suitcases, will integrate Lawrence’s paternal grandparents. In the video performance, Lawrence’s character will carry a series of blue suitcases — in which are contained musical instruments — across a void. “The void I found is in New Orleans, where a railroad track, a canal and a road are all within thirty to forty feet, so it’s about crossing that gap. It’s about transitions, changing from one life to another, starting fresh.”
The story focuses on Lawrence’s grandmother, who lived one life with one man (Lawrence’s grandfather) for some twenty-five years until he died, in debt, of a brain aneurism one Christmas. Within a few years she started a whole other life in Florida with another man, with whom she lived for another twenty-five years.

“How do you handle those big life changes?” Lawrence asks with Arranging Suitcases. “How do you move from one place to another both physically and emotionally, and announce yourself. The instruments [inside the suitcases] are brass instruments, broadcasting instruments: a sousaphone and two baritones hybridized. So I’ll be unpacking and assembling it. The video performance will just be the crossing, but then there’s going to be a flashback of a dance sequence that will be part of the live performance, and that will be introducing my grandfather, who I didn’t get to know. There will be wallpaper that incorporates my grandmother’s hair, and showing the horn. She had a lot of wallpaper in both of her houses, the one in which my dad grew up, and the one she moved to in Florida. That’ll also be part of her costume.”

History, both individual and societal, is dense with repetitions. Lawrence personalizes the personal in a sequence of repeated gestures. He transforms the interminable act of crossing a void and walking a treadmill into the fixing of things, an act that ultimately restores the individual experience into something universally sustaining. Lawrence might see a line of people on treadmills in a gym moving towards a window or television screen without ever reaching it as tragic or hilarious, but never futile. The gestures he performs reach back to the Situationists, who imbued poetry into the everyday existence.

In interviews, Lawrence cites the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve as one of his points of inspiration, but he can also be connected to Stewart Sherman (1945-2001), a similarly mercurial artist who incorporated text, collage, sculpture and film, but who was essentially engaged in performance, in spectacle. Like both van de Werve and Sherman, Lawrence’s performances are solo acts. Even while inciting a cast of characters (Stewart adapted a 20-minute Hamlet, and a five-minute Faust), it is the individual who summons the narrative experience.

Do solitary investigations cause artists to confront the validity of their endeavors? Perhaps performance artists such as Lawrence, who create memory pieces from repetitive acts, are particularly prone to such questions.

“I wonder if it’s narcissism, that we can’t just put our product out there? I struggle with why art matters. Even though I know emotionally when I go to a show and enjoy something and it really connects with me. But then sometimes in the act [of performance] I’m wondering: What’s the point in this? I’m investing all this money and time. And there’s putting yourself out there and seeing how people respond to it. It can be intimidating.”