Arboretum at SCAD | 2024

Arboretum at SCAD

31st July – 30th December 2024

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, USA

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An Arboretum is a type of botanical garden that focuses on the cultivation of trees, shrubs, and other woody plants. Its purpose is to showcase and promote the study of various trees and plants in a natural outdoor environment. An arboretum is typically open to the publicin a natural outdoor setting, in contrastto a greenhouse that contains a limitedvariety of plants in a climate-controlled indoor environment.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic that sent a number of global populations into state-imposed lockdowns, Gurgaon-based artist duo Thukral and Tagra accumulated a photographic archive of trees, leaves, pixels, flowers and skies. Primarily captured through the intimacy of their mobile phones, these pictures over time became visual notes that they exchanged with each other on a daily basis. Away from their home turf of Gurgaon in the Delhi Capital region, they spent time in Goa and Pondicherry and reoriented themselves to the new global condition that everyone was still coming to terms with.

Shifting from a sense of calendrical time that streamlines a day as a cadence of tasks and errands, their perception of everyday life gradually reconfigured with combinations of care, contemplation, and rest. Their vertical and horizontal visions were endlessly staring at the trees and the blue skies, zooming in and out, lying down and staying put in the afternoon sun. It was, for them, a new temporal and spatial entry into nature through long moments of stillness and subtle movement.

The result is an Arboretum, a series of pixels and paintings where a community of trees take over the dream and imaginary compositions the artists are known for. They infuse meticulous realism with glitches
provoking us to see the real as glitch and glitch as the real. Further, the shape of the canvases simulates that of the passing clouds and windows, a recurring element in their artistic language. 

Mimesis emerges as a residue and extension of Thukral and Tagra’s recent series of works, Arboretum, a contemplation on communities of trees. Like the seedlings, these fragmented canvases with coloured pixels embark on an infinite journey of visualising data as an artistic endeavour. For Thukral and Tagra, it is the fascination of data collection amid high-speed algorithms through the materiality of painting. “We wanted to imagine units, clusters, as we all think of a collection in terms of date, time, artwork, and audiences. We see these unique numbers as data sets, each speaking to the enormity of practices, ideas, and materials that have passed through”