In homage to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," these trees and rocks reference a cultural condition where, more than ever, we perceive the unique and physically present phenomena around us as a symbol of themselves. What we see gets sorted through terms of lexical categorization as a member of a group ("tree," "rock") and undergoes a sort of invisibility.

As representations of representations, or symbols of symbols, my own trees and rocks aim to complete the cycle of reproduction by which our mechanical, digital, and neurological abilities have refracted them. Made of wood and an industrially produced image of a forest, the simplicity of the tree is evokative of primitive computer graphics. With the union of these three elements -- digital, natural, and industrial/cultural -- the various refractions of the original natural entity are brought full circle into a single whole piece.