Tree Limns: Downtown Core | Installation 2020 | Santa Rosa, CA

The ideal urban core functions as city’s nexus of activity, movement, and cultural vibrancy, all of which are being tested during 2020. Many cities are fostering connectedness in the this time of disconnectedness by de-emphasizing the closed confine of the automobile and emphasizing the openness of the pedestrian experience. In closing the downtown 4th Street corridor to traffic, Santa Rosa, California has created a pedestrian-scale open commons, relaxed from the grip of vehicular pressures. Restaurants are open and extending out into the street, children and families are appropriating open spaces from cars, art and culture are re-asserting out into open-air expressions.

Tree Limns: Downtown Core weaves light and color through tree canopies, in a progression from and iteration of Tree Limns: Light the Dark. The lights complement the enhanced pedestrian uses of urban space, and encourage contemplation of the connections between the built and the natural. Polygons overlap with the street trees natural forms, and draw the eye upwards away from the strict planes of urban streets and sidewalks, framing branches and sky. Shifting colors glow warmth from overhead, and movement is observed by those who would pause.

The project is funded by the Santa Rosa Open & Out program, a collaboration between municipal and downtown commercial entities.

Please follow the project on Instagram @tree.limns (https://www.instagram.com/tree.limns/), and browse the feed below:

Tree Limns: Light the Dark | Installation 2018-2019

Tree Limns is a public art project threading LED tubes through the trees of a darkened traffic island at the intersection of 4th St and College Ave in Santa Rosa, CA.  The lights fill the interstitial space between tree branches and rushing traffic, introducing color and inviting moments of calm in the midst of the hectic urban landscape.  Project by Spolia Design/Build. A Pop-Up Creativity Grant from Creative Sonoma.  Endorsed by the Art In Public Spaces Committee of the City of Santa Rosa.

Liminal spaces are spatial and psychological transition zones - thresholds between states of mind and phases of matter. They are ambiguous and disorienting, like the process of waking, and thrilling, like diving into water. Liminal phases are the intangible and indeterminate times of life when we change, learn, and grow.

Spaces and landscapes change, and urban landscapes are continually evolving. Thresholds - aka. points of entry and portals between spaces - act as tangible transition moments, and street intersections are physical embodiments of those transitions. The intersection of Fourth Street and College Avenue is a number of portals: from the East side of Santa Rosa to the Downtown Core; from residential neighborhoods to commercial zones; a link between surface streets and high-traffic volume connector roads.

The off-kilter intersection of the east-west College Avenue artery and the south/southwest-north/northeast curve of Fourth Street also has a shard of a traffic island that is marooned between many careening lanes of traffic. In between these lanes, there are stands of mature trees (Redwood, Holly-leafed Cherry, Crepe Myrtle, and a lone Pistache) that were planted in carefully spaced groups of three. Whether planned as a park and then carved and whittled away by expanding road rights-of-way, or planted as vegetative touchstones amidst bustling cars and trucks, the island is wholly contained within the traffic. The trees have grown into gnarled specimen, with alternately upright stately trunks, sinuous branches, and full canopies.

At night, the island is a void - and Tree Limns brings light and shifting color to the dark, illuminating on a scaffold of branches a liminal, transitional urban space: natural/built, car-centric/pedestrian-friendly, asphalt/soil, downtown/residential. The light calls attention to a forgotten space, and invite a moment of pause and contemplation.