THE GHOST TREES

For the month of April 2008, the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery’s Window on Broad is proud to host Michelle Wilson’s site-specific installation THE GHOST TREES. The Window is located at 322 South Broad Street, on Philadelphia’s own Avenue of the Arts, and is viewable from the street twenty-four hours a day. During the day, subtle embossing can be seen on the large sheets of handmade paper, while after dark, the installation is a haunting, magical work of illuminated art.

Installed in downtown Center City, the heart of Philadelphia business district, THE GHOST TREES will remind the numerous downtown institutions of the amount of wasted paper in Philadelphia. By creating a haunting of paper itself, THE GHOST TREES reminds viewers of the unsustainable amount of deforestation caused by our nation’s demand for paper – 30 million forested acres are harvested a year, an area almost the size of the state of Pennsylvania. In Wilson’s own neighborhood of South Kensington, residents’ recycling has not been picked up for the past six months, despite her calls to City Hall.

In 2007, Michelle Wilson’s work was featured in AFTERMATH, a solo exhibition as part of the Powel House Museum’s Landmarks Contemporary Projects series, and was recently selected to be part of exhibition SUBLIME CLIMATE, at the newly founded Garthwaite Institute for Science and Art in Weston, Massachusetts. She has also been featured in exhibitions at the Phillips Museum, the National Constitution Center, the Nasu International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Japan, and the Second International Biennial for the Artists’ Book, in Alexandria, Egypt. Wilson’s imprint, Rocinante Press, is based in Philadelphia. For more information about Michelle Wilson, please visit her Artist Page on Inliquid.com.