One of the country’s only outdoor art exhibits occurring in a public nature preserve, Rootbound: Heaven and Earth IV offers visitors a 2-3 mile sculpture trail through Carkeek’s canyons and creeks in northwest Seattle, highlighted this year by performance art and site-specific sculpture in 120-year old Piper’s Orchard. Additional media include sound art, kinetic sculptures, and landscape interventions. All works are considered experimental: some are designed to last for the entire four month display period, while others incorporate decay and erosion. The exhibit’s themes offer a variety of perspectives on art and nature.

Sponsored by Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle Parks and Recreation, Carkeek Park Advisory Council, Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, and 4Culture Site Specific.

Damage:

Less than a month into its display period (June 23 – Oct. 31), the Rootbound exhibition of temporary artwork in Carkeek Park suffered widespread damage, including the arson of artist Josho Somine’s 20’ tall cardboard tree, “a shrine of fragile ambitions,” which the Seattle Fire Department responded to at 4:30 pm on Wednesday July 18. The piece burned to the ground.

Following a review in The Stranger, artist Fox Spears’ work “I Will Go Back and Not Come Out,” consisting of four large, hand-woven dream catchers, is missing. Spears, a Native American artist, like the others in the show, is now contemplating how best to respond.

Numerous other works reflect a particularly aggressive public attitude this summer, including: removal and damage to Suze Woolf’s “Tree Futures”; damage to Viewlands Group’s “Landscape Intervention” (subsequently repaired); damage to Tiki Muvihill’s “Fruitless Grafting”; and dismantling and removal of about 50% of The Unearth Collective’s “The Mediated Landscape.”

Curator David Francis explains that for these kinds of cutting-edge, experimental exhibitions, such response is part of the art’s greater purpose, “to help people learn how to see the world in a new way,” apart from a static display of art in a gallery, museum, or even a more guarded public urban space. “By activating a nature preserve where people are radically free to interact with art,” reflects Francis, “all kinds of boundaries are redrawn. Where does the artwork begin? Where does it end? Can a work of art predicated on change be seen in one or two visits? What if the actual object is a mere stand-in for the actual artwork, which is the intangible and subtle adjustment of the public’s understanding of art?”

Featured Image: Alan Fulle’s Four Noble Truths reduced to rubble by vandals

Added 06/22/2021