Panya Clark Espinal

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, detail

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, detail

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003, installation view

The Jack Pine Remembered, 2003

Public Art Commission for
Amica Mature Lifestyles Residence, Toronto

aluminum, steel, paint; 15 feet x 6 feet x 6 inches

This free-standing, double-sided structure plays with our notions of depictions and reproductions of nature. A detail from Tom Thomson’s painting, The Jack Pine, was digitized and enlarged to the real-life scale of a pine tree. The digitized image was rendered in 1440 pixels in a range of 40 colours. Each pixel was then translated into a 3 x 3 x 6 inch square tubular aluminium extrusion. Each extrusion was painted and clear-coated with an industrial coating system and stacked within a frame. The holes in the aluminium tubes cause the visibility of the image to wax and wan with the shifting angles of light and shadow, similar to a hologram. The pixelated structure acts as a metaphor for the way we build and interpret infinite pieces of information into memories, while the fading and revealing of the image suggests the precarious condition of memory as we age and time passes.