Beth Lilly

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Shot entirely with a cell phone camera, "The Oracle@Wifi" is a performance art project that allows individuals to interact directly with an artist and critically participate in the creation of art. Modeled loosely on fortune telling, I offer my services as an "oracle" and invite the general public to call me on the 7th day of the month. When someone calls me, they must keep their question secret from me. Starting at the location where I took their call, I take three photographs and email to the caller. They reply revealing their question. These randomly generated images will, in theory, answer their question.  The images and accompanying text become a document of the interaction and are posted on the project blog.

The recent explosive growth seen my many Southern cities began a turf war where both tress and power lines fight for the same thin stretch of green space. The idea of an actual war waging unnoticed on city streets caught my imagination. Hidden in plain view were literally the front lines in the Nature vs. civilization conflict. Starting in 2006, I photographed in Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte to tell this story from the trees’ point of view. The photographs prompt viewers to ask questions about the relations between humans and non-humans, and the evolution of the city’s civic landscape. Just who are the monsters? Is it the trees that have been engineered into unnatural shapes or the systems that place green space at the bottom of the power hierarchy?

The oldest existing mountain range in the world, the Cohuttas, lies hidden within sections of Appalachia in Western North Carolina and Georgia. An unimaginable span of time wore jagged peaks smooth and filled in valleys with layers of ancient forests that were born, rose and fell into decay. A stillness and peace presides as if all issues were long resolved in shared histories too subtle for human comprehension. The trees and the spaces they form experience time completely different from us. Compared to our brief flash of life, they are the immortals.

When I was very young, I had a recurring dream where I spun around and around like a dervish while performing math problems over and over in my head: 3 + 4 = 7 - 5 = 2 + 7 = 9.  This series reminds me of that dream. That through the action of repeating, an underlying pattern or system that governs the world might be revealed. I created these images by repeating the image of a single tree, side by side, it's equal and it's opposite. The patterns formed by two different oaks, while the same species, would be totally distinct. Like alchemy, the visual repetition is a process that reveals the hidden character of that tree. These images are printed digitally but using mulberry paper, the traditional paper for Japanese sumi ink drawings. Using black pigment inks only, the paper holds incredible detail and, due to the transparent nature of the delicate paper, the ink visibly floats on the surface.