Just branching out Memphis, here’s your new tree of pants
Adam and Eve had the Tree of Knowledge. Charles Darwin had the Tree of Life. Memphis, you now have the Tree of Pants. Erected in the rotunda of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the tree has a height of 24 feet. It also has a lot of legs, or pant legs, sewn and stitched into its branches and trunk, the fabric puckered to resemble bark, if bark contained an occasional pocket or belt loop.
“I’m just inviting people to see objects they know in a different light,” explained Colombian artist Federico Uribe, whose large pants tree is augmented with “leaves” made from different types of green socks and “birds” created from used books.
Even during off-hours, the tree will have spectators: Sculptures of a baboon and a cat, each covered in spent bullet casings in lieu of fur, peer at the strange plant, as if wondering whether khaki branches can support the weight of metallic mammals.
A bullet baboon. A pants tree. As you may have deduced, Uribe’s method, as seen in his installations in museums and public spaces around the world, is to repurpose discarded manufactured objects as art that imagines a type of fanciful resurrection. And not just any objects: Uribe’s unnatural reproductions of natural wonders are born from the very items that eliminate the life forms they represent.
“These pants, mostly, were made out of cotton,” Uribe explained. “Now, they’re a ‘plant’ again.” (In similar fashion, Uribe is creating a coral reef out of plastic garbage for the upcoming Venice Biennale.)
The result tickles the imagination, fulfilling Uribe’s stated goal of making art that makes people smile.
“It’s so great to have a tree inside the building,” commented former Brooks film and public programming curator Andria Lisle, now back at the museum as “curator of strategic engagement.”
Lisle pointed out that the Brook always has been associated with wonderful outdoor trees. After all,
the museum — for now, at least (plans call for an eventual move Downtown) — is nestled inside Overton Park, notable for its old-growth forest and its multitude of tulip poplars, willow oaks, sugar maples and other arboreal species.
Uribe refers to his Brooks creation of a “tree of hard life,” thanks to its unusual origin. The hundreds of disassembled khaki pants in the tree were gathered by the artist at Salvation Army stores, Goodwill stores and other secondhand shops, which means many and maybe most of these pants were worn on the job, by working men and women.
In other words, these pants have a history, if no longer calves, thighs or buttocks.
“Art is never about what you think, but I will tell you what I think anyway,” said the Bogota-born, Miami-based Uribe, 55. “I thought I was making a statement about building your life from your work, building your life with your family. You’re building something, you’re leaving something behind.”
Erected in late August by Uribe and his two associates, Marco Inzerillo, from Italy, and Edwyn Barrios, from Cuba, the installation is the latest in a series of “Rotunda Projects” that have dominated the wide entrance area of the Brooks for the past two years, since the museum’s signature “Vide-O-belisk” — a tower of vintage televisions and neon signs created by the late South Korean artist Nam June Paik in 2002 — was removed for conservation.
“The Rotunda Projects series will engage visitors with experimental, provocative, and compelling works in a variety of styles and employing diverse materials created by internationally recognized and emerging artists,” the Brooks promised in a statement.
The first of these was British/Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s unsettling “Rage of the Ballet Gods,” a group of strange insectoid and androidical sculpted dancers wielding daggers and tridents that heralded further oddities to come. Subsequent rotunda projects have included a blood-red giant spiderweb, more or less, and a mobile that resembled a frozen-in-time explosion inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
For the project, Uribe has made his first trip to Memphis, a city that he says was made famous by artists, citing Elvis Presley and B.B. King.
As for his own creative inclinations, Uribe credits his artist’s eye to his inherent shyness as a child.
“When you’re shy you have a lot of time to think and a lot of time to see — especially to see,” he said. “I saw a lot of things that other people didn’t see — not because they’re not sensitive or intelligent but because I had a lot of time to observe, and you don’t have as much time to observe when you’re actually playing.”