Jack Larimore Exhibition

by: Sarah Archer

Earlier this year, I met a tree that’s older than the United States of America. Traveling with my husband in South Carolina, we were exploring the Sweet Grass Basket corridor on Highway 17, and decided to drive to Johns Island, Southwest of Charleston. A very old tree lives there, protected by employees of Charleston County’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Everyone we saw there followed the rules, of which there were a few. We wore masks to protect one another from COVID-19, and children of all ages resisted the mighty urge to climb it. Its branches swoop down and touch the ground, then curve up again, like the arc of a bouncing ball. Its canopy is massive, filtering the sunlight like lace, and the air is appreciably cooler in its shade. It might be five centuries old or more. It’s older than the colony of South Carolina, possibly older than the New World, or even the idea of a New World. To locals, it’s known as the Angel Oak. Visitors to the Oak sometimes say that it reminds them of a fairy tail; there’s something about the mossy quiet of the place that’s transporting, and a little magical. But more than the “fairy,” it’s the “tale,” because the tree, like all trees, tells a story. It is, after all, an angel.

Jack Larimore’s work Seven is inspired in part by the curious preponderance of the number seven in faith traditions and folklore all over the world. There are seven deadly sins, and seven virtues to set you right. Seven Pleiades glowing in the sky, seven chakras, seven days to mark time. Seven colors of light, according to Sir Isaac Newton. And according to some early Jewish texts, seven archangels: Barachiel, Gabriel, Jophiel, Michael, Raphael, Selaphiel, and Uriel. In English, we use the word “angel” to describe someone who’s extraordinarily good, who’s helpful without being summoned. An angel is a person who makes things right, gets things done, goes out of their way to be kind, or cleans the house within an inch of its very life. We inherit the word from Hebrew, by way of the Ancient Greek angelos, and in its original form, it means something very particular: messenger. Angels are the intermediaries between the human world and the divine. When they appear, it’s because there’s news, though humans who get the message may not understand it.

When artists work with wood, they’re fitting elements of nature’s texts into new works of nonfiction. Trees record the events of their lives while they stand, and send us messages from their time once they’re felled. When we live with wooden furniture, or cook with wooden spoons, we touch their recorded history over and over without necessarily understanding what we’re encountering, and what memories may be passing through our hands. The works in this exhibition each hold two stories: the recorded history intrinsic to the materials from which they’ve been made, and the message of Larimore’s vision, the two together forming a new tale. Taken as a group, they ask us a series of questions: am I safely contained, or am I trapped? Is anyone seeing this, or will it be ignored? Will I be remembered, or forgotten? Will our planet be safe for us in the future, or won’t it?

The sculpture “Re-Pair” resembles two chairs set in a conversational group. Made in Oregon, where the timber industry has shaped the economy and the landscape for good and for ill, this work incorporates an old growth Douglas Fir and pieces of a 2 x 4—each evocative symbols and relics of the lumber business. Formed as they are into seats that don’t look especially inviting to sit on, this piece invites us to have, or at least consider, a conversation we might rather avoid about the tension between industry, livelihoods, and life itself in the natural world. Likewise, with “Trial,” two hefty pieces of wood face off against one another, one charred, the other unblemished. A chain hangs between the two, and small cutouts (one rectangular, one circular) tell us that there are different ways to see the object of conversation from different sides, even as the volume and form of each piece of wood seem very alike. And in [UNTITLED 3], a hollowed out sycamore, which Larimore found dead on arrival, is bestowed with new life, paired with a blackened form and a cluster of delicate branches. Formerly rotted out, he has smoothed its interior—an impossibly delicate task when dry wood is involved—leaving behind only the shell, and an implied story where a robust tree once was.

We’re encouraged to peer into a tunnel in “Portal,” to consider where memories and dreams might live. Are they somewhere far away that we cannot see, or remember? In a physical place, or indexed ephemerally, in the mind? Though memories seem permanent, research has shown that our memories evolve over time, and we don’t remember experiences—even indelible ones—as crisply as we believe, or exactly the same way each time. Small details vanish, others migrate from similar experiences, and our feelings about a memory can change as we mature. Is it still in there? Look hard.

In “Femina,” we’ve been invited to a wedding of sorts, but the bride is partially hidden from view by a latticework scrim. Is she protected, or trapped? Everyone can see her. But do we see her clearly? The presence of a dress without a bride emphasizes the scaffolding of tradition and ceremony that surrounds weddings, and indeed the wedding industrial complex, with its attendant economies of flowers, food, photography, and musical accompaniment. 

By now you may have an acute sense that you’re being watched. And you are: there seven of them, forming a half circle at the far end of the gallery, perched in surveillance. Or perhaps protection. Are they menacing? Just keeping an eye on things? Metal tools combined with elaborate roots tell us of their connection to the earth. They seem to belong here. Larimore writes of this piece, entitled “Seven”: “As individuals we bear witness individually. Does shared experience as witnesses inform our ethos? Our truth? Our humanity?” Do we all see the same thing when we look? Clearly not, or we wouldn’t be so polarized on the land of the country we share, whose history we contest, tug at, and pull apart. Are they angels? In a certain literal sense they must be, because they come bearing a message: don’t look away.