Discarded Christmas Trees Transformed Into an Ethereal Forest
The few weeks following the holidays are depressing for a lot of reasons, but none so clear as the Christmas-tree casualties lining every block. What once filled your home with all that’s merry and bright now sadly sits atop a pile of garbage.
Artist Michael Neff turns Brooklyn, N.Y.’s trashed trees into treasure. In his dreamy art installation, called Suspended Forest, Neff hangs the Christmas trees by twine to look like floating woods.
The project started in 2012, when Neff, along with his wife and a friend, set out to collect discarded trees and hang them under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The unauthorized “exhibit” was quickly cleaned up by the city, so Neff sought a more permanent place to display his work.
This year’s display can be found in Queens, N.Y., at the Knockdown Center, an appropriately named art space that was formerly a factory. The 50,000-square-foot space is filled with a grid of 40 trees for viewers to walk through.
“The enclosed space also allows scent of pine to remain, a more pleasant experience than the scents of Metropolitan Avenue,” Neff adds in his statement.
This year’s materials are particularly sadder than Christmas trees reclaimed in the past, because many of them never even made it to living rooms for the holidays. Neff told Fast Company that nearly 80 percent of the trees in this year’s installation were simply left behind by sellers.
“There’s speculation that it’s because it was so warm,” Neff says. “There were tons and tons of trees that were still bundled up that sellers had just abandoned.”
Suspended Forest will be at the Knockdown Center in Queens, N.Y., until Jan. 31.
More at Yahoo Makers:
Damien Hirst’s ‘Drugged’ Christmas Tree Stirs Up Controversy
Trash to Treasure: 6 of America’s Coolest Junkyard Artists
IT Worker’s Dumpster-Diving Hobby Brings $2,500 a Night
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