Back in the day — say, 50,000 BCE — goddesses were worshiped across several ancient civilizations. By 2400 BCE, however, Mesopotamian law declared: “If a woman speaks to a man out of turn, her teeth will be smashed by a burnt brick.”
Closer to home, for much of the 19th century, abortion up to four months of pregnancy was legal in the United States. Today, abortion restrictions are in place in 22 states.
In other words, women’s rights and restrictions have swung like a pendulum across time and cultures. And now, such benchmarks are burned — quite literally — into a new work by Jewish artist Tiffany Shlain. “Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History,” features some 30 touchstones of women’s rights and setbacks, burned into a 60 x 55 inch cross-section of a majestic Deodar cedar tree trunk. The artwork’s name is a pun on the word “dendrochronology,” which is the study of tree rings to estimate the passage of time.
The piece is one of 12 multimedia works on view at Shlain’s debut solo exhibition, “You Are Here,” on view at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery (520 West 27th St.) beginning on Thursday, Sept. 5. For Shlain — a San Francisco-based multi-hyphenate whose previous credits include several films about feminist history, including “The Tribe,” a humorous examination of American Jewish identity through the lens of Barbie — the body of work is an outgrowth of her Shabbat afternoons spent among the redwood trees in Muir Woods National Monument and other state parks nearby.
A self-described “cultural Jew,” Shlain, 54, began keeping a screen-free “Tech Shabbat” 15 years ago, eventually writing the book “24/6: Giving up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection,” in 2019.
“Shabbat is the most brilliant idea of our people, and this very simple, ancient practice that I’ve done now for 15 years has influenced all of my work,” Shlain told the New York Jewish Week via Zoom. “This whole body of work is drawn from doing Shabbat and being in nature one day a week.”
As for the tree-ring piece, in particular, Shlain said it felt like a “privilege” to work on. “So many of our historical monuments are so male dominated — we needed a new visual,” she says in a short video about Dendrofemonology that will be playing at the gallery alongside the exhibit. “I realized I needed to create a feminist history tree ring. I wanted to see that. I wanted my daughters to see that, I wanted everybody to see that.”
The dates Shlain chose for the timeline — which, for the record, is not to scale — mark both the wins and losses women have endured throughout history, and highlight gains both substantial and minimal. One marker, for example, celebrates the first woman in space (Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, 1963). Another notes that 1993 was the year women were permitted to wear pants on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Still another simply states: “1450-1918: 50,000 women tortured and executed as witches across Europe and North America.”
“It was a year-long process to distill all the research I had done for my films, meet with advisors and bring on other perspectives and put 50,000 years of history into 32 lines,” Shlain explained. “Of course, like any art, what’s there and what’s left out is part of the art.”
A close-up of “Dendrofemonology,” by Tiffany Shlain. The entire piece is 60 inches by 55 inches. (Courtesy Tiffany Shlain)
Aside from “Dendrofemonlogy,” the Chelsea exhibit will feature other works Shlain made out of tree slices, as well as photographs, films and lightboxes. Collectively, the works explore the idea of “scale and nature and time and putting things into perspective,” she said. The exhibit will be also be accompanied by a one-day “activation” in Madison Square Park on Sept. 21, where the cast of “Suffs” — the Broadway musical about women’s suffrage, created by Shaina Taub — will perform, and the group will then walk over to the gallery where Shlain will give an artist talk.
In addition to the pieces on view in New York City, Shlain, who founded the Webby Awards, known as “the Oscars of the Internet” in 1996, continues to work with tree slices. Alongside her husband, artist and professor Ken Goldberg, Shlain is completing a tree ring piece that chronicles a timeline of Jewish history, “Dendrojudeology,” which will be unveiled this fall in Los Angeles at the Getty PST exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center.
“We had been working on Dendrojudeology for two years, and then Oct. 7 happened,” Shlain said. “We’ve gone back through all these lines that are fraught, and made sure that they’re open enough for all the different interpretations, because all of my work is trying to invite more people in.”
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As Shlain states in her video: “Trees are such an interesting way to think about time. These silent witnesses to history that have been alive for thousands of years and seen so much make me think about our place in this larger story.”
