OCMA (Orange County Museum of Art)

For the exhibition ​Underworld Stories Told in Tree Time​, Daniel Duford looks to Gary Snyder’s poem ​The Way West, Underground​ to explore new narratives about our relationship to the natural world. In the stories Duford tells through his narrative painting and prints, the renewal of natural resources is a means of resistance to dominant narratives that value the destruction of nature for the sake of growth and civilization. He portrays the Earth as a living entity with the power to regenerate and survive over time. Treating the landscape as an essential character in the work, Duford develops the concept of “tree time,” or the slow perception of tree growth as a model for a longer narrative arc in the story of the North American landscape, potentially over centuries.