Planting 7,000 recycled artificial evergreen Christmas trees outdoors throughout the United States
Director's Statement
An artificial tree's functional life-span often extends beyond most people's desire to keep it around. So an unwanted tree either finds a new home, or it ends up in the trash. Since these trees are not recyclable in the conventional sense, I have adopted the term, 'Treecycle' for our project, which just means to reuse a tree in a novel way. As long as artificial evergreen trees are around and continue to be manufactured, we will find creative ways to repurpose them when they are no longer wanted.
This project combines my fascination with pine tree cell phone towers, chain-link barricades that double as hedges, Astroturf lawns, and living trees. Synthetic nature is relatively new, having grown from this past century's flood of petroleum and a preference for a cleaner, low-maintenance nature. Despite this brief history, it's not hard to imagine a human environment that is increasingly synthetic with an organic guise.
-Justin Shull