LYLA RYE

What makes a tree, a tree? This series of eight short videos explore this question by focusing on a large Black Willow situated between a busy pedestrian walkway and a construction site. With deeply grooved bark and a twisted trunk, it bears scars from lost branches, supports parasitic plants and has holes bearing evidence of animal inhabitants. I was drawn to it as embodying life, death, aging, regeneration and nurturing.
I approached the videos as if they were poems; distinctive, concise, lyrical and focused on disparate aspects of the tree. Each was given to a different composer as an experiment on how their audio interpretation would affect our perception of the imagery. As the tree has been destroyed since the start of the project, these videos now serve as elegies.
Six audio artists were chosen for their diverse approaches to sound. I've left one silent and made the score for another using only audio samples from my footage of the tree. The composers are: pianist Eve Egoyan (www.eveegoyan.com), percussionist and composer Debashis Sinha (www.debsinha.com), sculptor John Dickson (www.johndickson.ca), musician Max Turnbull (www.badgeepoque.bandcamp.com), artist and creative technologist Dan Tapper (www.instagram.com/visualcodepoetry) and Meg Remy, a songwriter and vocalist (www.yousgirls.com).