Skip to content
Menu
ROBERT HENGEVELD
  • Title
    • 85:100
    • Common Ground
    • Dead or Alive
    • Decoy
    • Drawings
    • Erratic Turns
    • Fading 82
    • Farley’s Heap: Casper’s Keep
    • Fight or Flight
    • Forgery Island
    • Ghostrider
    • Handscape Agglomerate
    • Hint of the Hinterland
    • HOWL (Art Gallery of Guelph)
    • HOWL (Nuit Blanche)
    • HOWL, MacDonald Stewart Art Centre
    • in pursuit of paradise
    • Into the Wild
    • it only ever really happens every once in a while
    • It only ever really happens every once in a while
    • Itten-Judd Studies
    • Kentucky Perfect
    • Miss November
    • Natural Revision
    • Pickled Tense
    • Promised Lands: Abridged and Appended
    • Residue
    • Rotating Tree
    • Speaking of Rock
    • SSSpun
    • Staging the Gap
    • Still Looking For More
    • Stock Extravaganza
    • Synthetic Humph
    • Taking it to the Moon
    • The Way Life Should Be
    • Totally Square
    • unbridled rein
    • TTTourner
    • Uprising
    • Wile Wild
    • Where Phantoms Meet
  • About
    • CV
    • Bibliography
  • News
  • Contact
  • Silver Platter Contemporary Art Projects
Close Menu

Rotating Tree

Simply a planted deciduous tree. Simple, unnoticed, and familiar, that is until one realizes that the tree is in fact moving, rotating at its trunk at a nearly unperceivable rate of one rotation every two to three minutes. What is planted is a robust and durable rotating mechanism, hidden underground, unseen and inaudible. The tree blends into its natural surroundings, into the everyday, the overlooked.

Fading into the familiarity of our daily surroundings, the daily walk, until that very glaze of familiarity, the seen but unnoticed, is shatter through the realization that there is nothing familiar about it. It appears normal and is yet extremely abnormal. Real and yet evidently fictive.

This contrasting of the preconceived (a tree) and the perceived (a tree rotating) creates an uncanny experience in which the viewer is left to rectify two contrasting realities. This juxtaposition of preconception and perception results in a rethinking of the everyday, of the environment that surrounds us, and creates a heightened awareness of the familiar surroundings, albeit momentary.

Like in much of my work, this project develops a tension between fact and fiction, exploring the fluctuating boundaries between the real and the simulated.

Back To Top
ROBERT HENGEVELD
 
 

Recent Posts

  • Presentation at Universities Arts Association of Canada, Banff Centre for the Arts
  • Artist Talk: Gladstone Hotel, May 15 2017
  • Presenting a talk for the MacLaren Art Centre’s ‘Art for Lunch’ series.
  • Miss November installed at MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie ON
  • Review of the project Passages Insolites, Quebec City