Photo by Margaret Keller
The "Botanica absentia" installation
Almost every day, Margaret Keller walks by a gnarled redbud that looks alien to her, an excess of seedpods pendulous from its startlingly thick, twisted branches. “It’s just out of control,” she says. “It looks like it has already mutated.” Worried about the tree, she researched the Eastern Redbud—and learned more than she’d cared to. “When I found out that almost one in five tree species will be extinct soon, I was just almost in a panic,” she says. “I thought, I have to do something.”
That something turned into “Botanica Absentia,” an exhibit installed at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis through December 29. It is, in Keller’s vision, a future museum depository dedicated to lost trees.
The idea came to her whole: “I just saw it, finished.” Her postcard for the exhibit looks like a photograph until you realize the perspective is impossible. This isn’t a photo; it’s the image she created in Photoshop before she even began constructing the installation. “I was imagining that I was in the future, and climate change had become so severe that most species on earth—including humans—were extinct or mutated.” The feeling was bleak, an overpowering sense of loss and grief. Keller wanted to create something of complicated, barren beauty.
She had only six weeks to do so.
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Photo by Margaret Keller
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Photo by Margaret Keller
A neighbor’s tree lost an 8-foot limb in a violent storm, and she asked for it. She stripped the bark and covered the tree with AlumiGraphics (a highly reflective, pliable material that attaches nanoparticles of aluminum to a substrate) and used aircraft repair aluminum to cover the knotholes. Then she hung the silver limb in a room with black walls and ceiling, and from it she hung seed pods cut from dichroic Plexiglas. She had to take two laser-cutting classes to master the exacting process—but it was worth it.
“The material’s transparent,” she says, “but when you hold it up, it’s a mirror: You can see yourself. Light refracts through it, splits into colors.” The rainbows shimmer and bounce off the silver holographic floor. “The room is very somber, everything is dead, but there’s a little bit of light, some energy in the space, a hint of hope.”
In the end, the installation became a reliquary. For the limb, Keller had used the techniques of death: wrapping, mummification, taxidermy. She also used a wall hung with rows of stainless-steel dog tags, each recording the scientific name of an extinct (in her future dystopica) tree species on each. Beneath the name is written “Memento mori,” a Latin reminder of the inevitability of death.
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Photo by Margaret Keller
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Photo by Margaret Keller
“Dog tags are identifiers,” Keller explains. “They’re used to identify dead bodies. Yet they look a lot like the markers the Missouri Botanical Garden uses.” Against the black wall of the installation, the small repeated rectangles take on the solemnity of Arlington or Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery—loss after loss after loss, the sameness conveying the magnitude.
“I chose the number of species that would fit on the wall,” she says, “but of course there are thousands more.”
The exhibit was curated by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis' teen museum studies program, and its beauty is “meant to be a bit of a hook,” she says. “I noticed people kept going in and not coming back out. They were taking selfies on the holographic floor.” She smiles. “I’ve taken a few myself.”
Visitors to the exhibit may buy buttons, made by Keller and affixed to a card that reads, “Currently, nearly 1 in 5 of earth’s approximately 60,000 tree species are threatened with extinction. Of these, over 1,900 are critically endangered and face extinction without urgent action.” The list of endangered trees includes giant sequoias, Fraser firs, and the American chestnut. The card offers a link to the list of threatened trees and gives a way to join the preservation effort.
Photo by Margaret Keller
More than 50 galleries and museums throughout the States—and in Berlin and Beijing—have exhibited Keller’s work. She is currently the teaching artist-in-residence at The Forsyth School; past positions include professor of art, historic preservation consultant, fiscal analyst for the Missouri legislature, cake decorator, and box-factory worker. She holds an MFA from Washington University and has done postgraduate study in experimental electronic media at Webster University.
