Lemon Tree Project: Abundance and Decay
A yearlong collaboration with my lemon tree and time. I photographed close-up portraits of the fallen lemons as they rotted over weeks and months into unique personages. In my video Every Lemon On The Tree the lens frantically chases every ripe lemon through branches and thorns, projected hyper-brightly squeezed into a tiny space. The project reflects the dark side of sunny prosperity in the context of the 2008-09 California real estate crash; and the queer, sublime beauty of failure, entropy, and decay.
ABOUT LEMON TREE PROJECT
“Liena Vayzman presents The Lemon Tree project, a study that took place over the course of 365 days, during which Vayzman studied the accumulation and decay of lemons from the lemon tree in her backyard. The tangible residue is a series of 10 photographs, which show these bright yellow objects as they rotted becoming green, blue, purple, shriveled, warped, depleted, and then nonexistent. Like Muybridge, Vayzman is capturing motion through time in photographs, but Vayzman has taken this experiment to a temporal extreme and embraced the entire cycle of change, including the ultimate entropy it entails.”
Jasmine Moorhead, Director, Krowswork Gallery/Project Space, Oakland, California
Lemon Tree Project was first exhibited in Time(Lapse), inspired by Edward Muybridge with artists Drone Dungeon, Katja Meijer and Kim Miskowitz curated by Jasmine Moorhead at Krowswork Gallery in Oakland. Lemon Tree Project photographs were first published in the Food issue of Proximity Magazine (Chicago).