Kaino’s show partners are the experiential art company Superblue, which has staged events in New York, Miami and London, and a business development arm of the Atlantic magazine, Atlantic Ventures. “A Forest for the Trees” is no exception. He’s co-curating the Hammer Museum’s 2024 Pacific Standard Time exhibition, “Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice,” and he worked with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2020 to create the immersive installation “Tidepools,” which utilized frozen alcohol vapor and bioluminescent marine organisms. “I feel like I’ve worked my entire career to build the skills and the tools to even try to conceive of this idea, let alone to hopefully accomplish it with a level of quality.”Ĭlimate justice and the art of collaboration have long been recurring themes in Kaino’s work, and he’s no stranger to large-scale, immersive art projects. ![]() Kaino says it’s the most ambitious work he’s ever created. The forest also includes handmade sculptures, animatronic robots, original music and glimmering installations that alternately employ mirrors, light, water and shadows to create a range of visual trickery. Most are tree remnants ethically sourced from a Northern California forest and repositioned inside the space, while others are cast replicas. The ticketed experience, which speaks to Indigenous practices around land stewardship, ecological interconnectedness and preservation of the environment, leads visitors on an hourlong journey through an actual forest with 87 redwood trees. This wilderness is part of Kaino’s “A Forest for the Trees,” an immersive new show he created and directed inside a 28,000-square-foot Boyle Heights warehouse. Then Kaino pivots and leads us into a mystical forest that’s thick with illusions and storytelling. And it shows how everything is connected - people to objects, to nature, to each other.” “Things that you thought were previously static aren’t. “Stare into it,” Kaino urges, counting backward from 10. Thunder and lightning sound in the background. Its briskly whirling spiral forms a hypnotic tunnel. I oblige and suddenly a giant, spinning disc bearing concentric tree rings appears in the darkness. We’re in a darkened warehouse, and Kaino’s silhouette is barely visible in the shadows. ![]() “Think of the lines on your hand as the roots of a tree.” “Open your palm,” artist Glenn Kaino instructs me.
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