In late October, Anita Rogers Gallery will host Aviva Rahmani's Blued Trees (2015 - present), her collection of embedded dispatches from the front lines of ecological conflict. Rahmani will present excerpts from her Blued Trees opera with dancer Rishauna Zumberg, pianist and arranger Luka Marinkovic, and soloist Alison Cheeseman. Rahmani will then moderate an international participatory streaming event to judge a fossil fuel executive and his wife for ecocide– what is the extent of liability?
In peer-reviewed publications and international exhibitions, she has strung connections between climate change activism, aesthetics, and sea level rise:
In 1990, after a long career in California and New York, I bought a New England town dump, restored the land and made it my work base. This year, my entire studio building with all my life's work almost washed away with winter storms. My sense of urgency, to give art a voice has never been greater.
Blued Trees was originally inspired by environmental activists, who asked her to create art to stop pipelines. Rahmani created a series of art installations in forest corridors where natural gas pipelines were proposed. She geolocated designated trees in an aerial pattern that corresponded to a copyrightable symphonic score of “tree notes” in 1/3-mile-long measures. Each tree was painted with a blue casein sine wave from the base to the canopy. Her project attracted international attention. In 2018, a Mock Trial granted her an injunction against further forest destruction by a hypothetical pipeline company. The trial inspired her opera-in-progress.
Just before the American presidential election, visitors will be invited to immerse themselves in the questions that have driven Rahmani's practice; to decide outcomes for ecocide, view some of the Blued Trees and ‘Are We Lost’ prints, experience arias, and engage in an audience participatory event.
Blued Trees emerged from intimate knowledge that without imminent intervention, we may all drown in a world of dead forests. It was made possible in part through a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, awarded in 2023, which supported Rahmani in the development of this body of work. Blued Trees in NYC was also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.