Dendrogram Mini Version (EN)

A work on portability, 3D drawing, stillness/action and the freedom of display

Dendrogram | Tree-kit (Mini Version) was made during the process of creating a large piece titled Dendrogram | Tree-kit.

Dendrogram | Tree-kit is a product of a research on the possibilities of drawing in space. Composed of painted wood modules, the piece is a three-dimensional drawing that incorporates the effects of light and shadow on the container’s surfaces — the exhibition space.

Dendrogram is a kit, several pieces that fit into a box or a bag. Its transformed branches may be mounted in a tent like fashion. This makes the artwork portable and mutant: it is either closed or open, still or active in space through the manipulation of its parts by a participant.

The analysis of our relationship with nature and how we have been culturally conditioned to experience it, is the basis from witch I have been creating fictional narratives in my artwork. The Dendrogram works developed from a research on a fictitious Botany in which I created new vegetable species in drawing. The fictional species were created from the ideas of taming, mimicking, manipulation and hybridization. The artifacts and visual materials produced are then organized into portable museums.
In the Dendrogram works, the original material of the tree shapes is hidden. Existent tree sticks are altered and painted into new shapes representing new-formed tree branches. This body of work entangles fact and fiction, organic and mechanic, natural and artificial, sculpture and drawing.

In the process of creating the Mini Version, born out of this context and the idea of stillness/action, the miniaturization of a box/container to hold the expanding mini 3D drawing accidentally grew into the shape of a matchbox. Consequently, the link to Ben Vautier’s Total Art Match-Box (1965) offered a new set of multiple layers necessary to resolve this work, which was especially created to reside in the Davis Lisboa Mini-Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona Collection.

The portable museum is a free form of the museum. Unconstrained by institutional weight, it is light; it travels, has no fixed context, and, most importantly, it is endowed with a sense of humor.

Catarina Leitão
April 2016