Matthew López-Jensen, "Reading Trees"

“Reading Trees” features large-scale prints from Matthew López-Jensen’s New York City Street Tree Tarot, reimagining the tree of knowledge as a conduit for personal transformation. About Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based, interdisciplinary environmental artist whose projects combine social practice, walking, photography, teaching, planting, cleaning, mapping, and research. Reading Trees celebrates his ongoing work with New York City street trees and his recent publication New York City Street Tree Tarot (Verlag Kettler). The project gathers scenes of environmental resilience and stewardship into a 78-card deck for reflection, education, and divination. The practice of divination, enacted via crystal balls, tea leaf readings, and tarot cards, is informed by the core belief that change is fated and often inevitable. Humans by nature abhor change, and we are particularly fearful of the juggernaut set off by the onset of events seemingly outside of our power to control –when in fact our reactions, actions or inaction got the ball of fate rolling to begin with. Divination offers a view into current causes and conditions that presage change and offer pathways, via coded images, to intuit outcomes and hence get a jump on fate. Like Garcia-Lopez, López-Jensen invites unconventional “methods to enhance cognition” to induce a sensitized psychic state that in turn conjures insights and solutions hitherto unimagined. As an eco-artist creatively engaged and in partnership with the natural world, López-Jensen’s Reading Trees tarot deck reimagines the mythic tree of knowledge as a salubrious conduit for personal transformation while inspiring individual action and a larger cultural reckoning with climate change. Read more Toggle Photography Installation Prints Performance / Live Art