suspended — BRITT RANSOM

Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, 2022

3D Scanned Oak Tree Remnants, SLA 3D Prints, Brass, Oak, Custom Attachments, Archival Prints, LED Rope Light, Audio Recording of Cicadas

Suspended is an exploration of what is speculated to be the oldest live oak in the city of New Orleans. Located in City Park, the McDonogh Oak has existed for over 800 years with a trunk that spans over 25ft in diameter. It is easily identified by locals and visitors alike by the colonnade of telephone poles that surround the tree to prop up its limbs, a common mediation technique used to protect and extend the life of live oaks.

Once part of the Jean Louis Allard Plantation established in the 1770’s, the location on which the tree sits was later purchased by John McDonogh who donated the land to the city upon his death in 1850. The tree was named in honor of this gift to the city and still retains McDonogh’s namesake despite its existence long before his proprietorship of the land and his complicated relationship with slaveholding. As society begins to acknowledge the truths of the past and unlink the names of those who perpetuated the dark realities of our nation's history from monuments, street names, and historic sites, the tree and its name still persist.

In Suspended, artist Britt Ransom visited the tree on daily walks during the height of the pandemic over the span of two years and collected elements left by the tree. Utilizing the round shape of the gallery and a light that wraps the space, Ransom directly references the process of 3D scanning where the computer captures multiple images of an object using a white flash and a turntable while rotating an object 360 degrees to create a computerized duplicate. The salon style images reference the images that are generated from the scanning process that are used to produce a point cloud to create a 3D model, thus allowing for these models to be replicated as 3D prints.

Much like the McDonogh Oak, when an object is 3D printed it is surrounded by a complex system of supports that allow the object to be created by the machine. Ransom’s work interrogates computerized attempts to replicate this complex and historic piece of nature. Each replica is precariously suspended atop of an oak block mimicking the way the tree’s branches are held up and supported by human mediation on site at City Park.

During a time when the climate continues to rapidly change and a larger acknowledgment of site history comes into sharper focus, Suspended examines what it means to attempt fossilizing nature on a site with a complex past. The continued imperfect attempt of both the artist and computer to reproduce natural ephemera through digital fabrication processes points to our human desire to suspend our impact on what can only exist for a brief moment and confront the realities of the past as we address the present.

Images 1-5 by Jason Kuppa, 2022

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