Primary Medium

Sculpture

Address

239 Java St Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn, 11222

Artist Statement

Using the logic of a nostalgic domestic object, Christmas Tree explores how the rituals of the holiday intersect with a culture of artificiality, and how nostalgia reproduces within that state of artificiality. It speculates on the nature of mass distributed ‘coziness’, something that emanates from the simulacra of artificial Christmas trees, following the progression of their production in aluminum in the 1950s to plastic more recently. For this piece, I reproduced the spine of my dead Christmas tree, collapsing the personal and the mass produced; I chose this unique tree at the Christmas Tree farm, and it has now become the model for a reproducible object. I 3D scanned my dead Christmas tree, remodeled it in segments with joinery, and then printed its 400+ segments in PETG plastic and gilded it in aluminum, to create a hollow object with the texture of the original tree. It's displayed on a base I made from the wood of the original tree. All the artificial trees get to come back home for Christmas, so I wanted to make mine immortal too. This dynamic reflects the blurring of material and symbol, and authenticity and alienation that permeates reality in the contemporary West—a culture defined by simulation, scrambled timelines, and material abstraction. And as the current socio political powers push the doomsday of AI and estrangement of analogue living, reality and culture set deeper into the dissonant space between nostalgia and artificiality.

Links

Website: https://ay-dan.com/
Instagram: @aydannova