Artist and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain and her husband, artist and UC Berkeley robotics professor Ken Goldberg, have been partners and artistic collaborators for nearly three decades. That collaboration informs their shared exhibition at di Rosa SF, “Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time and Technology,” which feels like a culmination of their individual and collective work, exploring gender, the environment and the dynamics of power.
Shlain’s “Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring,” on view for the first time in the city after being installed on the National Mall in Washington D.C., New York’s Madison Square Park, is a sculpture that maps 50,000 years of women’s history onto a salvaged cedar tree ring. It highlights 32 key milestones that challenge patriarchal narratives. Among them are goddess worship dating to 50,000 BCE, 1960s feminism, the #MeToo movement and the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Also featured is a new version of Goldberg’s “Bloom,” a video installation using live seismic data from the San Andreas fault that turns readouts into colorful, flower-like images. Goldeberg aims to transform potentially catastrophic environmental information into a meditation on life, growth and fragility.