KELLY AMTOWER
NW assistant professor and artist Kent Anderson Butler walks by a tree featured in his exhibition "Silent Witnesses."
The tree branches stretched toward the sky, gnarled and twisted. Water quietly lapped at the shore, reflecting a moody grayness that the morning had settled on. Fog rolled over the water and up the dull, grassy hill, shrouding the tree in its solitude.
NW assistant professor Kent Anderson Butler captured this moment in his recent photography exhibition “Silent Witnesses.”
“I’ve always been fascinated with nature, the landscape and especially trees,” Anderson Butler said. “For some reason, all throughout my life, anytime I’ve come upon a tree, there’s just something about it that I feel a kind of kinship to.”
The exhibition, which runs until Feb. 20, displays photos of three different trees on NW Campus, each with a progression of exposure pictures that range from an ethereal light to a dark depth.
“Stripped bare or softly veiled, these trees stand as sentinels, their stillness suggesting a deep connection to the land and the passage of time,” Anderson Butler said on his artist website. “They are silent witnesses to the awakening of the world.”
At the opening reception on Feb. 3, Anderson Butler described how each set of trees spoke to him differently.
“I use myself in my work,” Anderson Butler said. “I wanted to still be able to convey some of the things I’m interested in conceptually without using my physical body in the work. And so, in some ways, to me, these pieces act as absent portraits.”
“Unheard Voices,” the first photo series, displays a tree nestled among rocks on a reddish, grassy hillside. Anderson Butler said this tree spoke to him because it is “this solitary tree on this little bluff,” and he thinks, “Sometimes, we feel like that as individuals.”
“Hushed Observer,” the second series of photos, displays a tree looming above the murky Marine Creek Lake, almost as if it is peering at its reflection. The sky looks nearly endless, blending into the water in shades of blues and grays. Anderson Butler said the reflection of the water is similar to “the duality of who I am as an individual.”
“Mute Evidence,” the third series of photos, displays a tree rooted on a slanted grassy spot. In the background, a tree branch emerges from the gray lake, providing depth to the photo. Anderson Butler highlighted how the tree has “a relationship to the branch in the water,” almost as if “these two elements of nature are having dialogue with each other.”
The extreme exposure shots challenge the viewer to step closer to the picture, he said.
“Part of the body of work is also about perception,” he said. “These are photographed in the fog these trees … and if you look, it almost seems like it’s a time lapse, but from light to dark.”
Each series has 10 pictures of the same tree, but none are the same.
“As a photographer you move around like you are experiencing a space. The light’s changing, the clouds are changing and you’re usually looking for that perfect moment to get your shot,” NW arts professor Trish Igo said. “It’s like you’ve taken that perfect moment, and almost like a prism divides light, you spread it back out again.”
“Silent Witnesses” was taken using Anderson Butler’s phone camera in one sitting. He said he was on a morning walk down to the lake before his classes when he captured the photos.
This is Anderson Butler’s second year teaching at TCC, and his goal for his students is to “take the things that are deep and driven in their soul and then manifest those things out into a piece of art that they make.”
“I tell my students all the time, like it’s really easy for us to become numb to our surroundings,” he said.
Anderson Butler’s voice wavered and he teared up when he described the photography project a colleague of his, Ken Gonzales-Day, had published. “Hang Trees” by Gonzales-Day shows a series of trees that had been used in violent lynchings of the local immigrant population during the Civil Rights Movement in California.
“That really spoke to me, but it also started to make me think that these living elements of nature have a story, and at the same time, it’s like time just passes them by,” Anderson Butler said.
NW arts assistant instructor Damek Salazar, a colleague of Anderson Butler, connected how nature holds memories to his own life.
“The aspect of trees just being around for a long time is something that, as I get older, I kind of reflect on,” Salazar said. “There’s so many moments in my life where I’ve had specific events at specific places, and I’m like ‘There’s a part of a memory that’s sort of trapped there for me.’”
“Silent Witnesses” is not just an exhibition symbolizing the connection between memory and nature. Anderson Butler said he hopes this exhibition encourages people to slow their lives down a bit.
“I feel like it’s always hard for us to look at and talk about photography because we’re so used to seeing it everywhere, and so we don’t really think about how much photographic images read into our psyche,” Anderson Butler said. “As a culture, we need visual literacy.”