Titled by a love song to a tree from the opera Serse (1738) by Georg Friderich Handel and dovetailing with the 20th year of Project 88's founding by Sree Goswami in 2006, Never was a shade is a curatorial project by Prajna Desai that takes up the existential power of trees. Powered by a wide range of contemporary artists invited from an open call for works, the show wonders at arboreal presence and indifference, at the persistence of trees regardless of us and the influence of valuing them through the filter of our needs. This is hardly to downplay the environmental virtuosity that trees have always possessed. But cherishing trees chiefly as instruments of our survival circumvents their essential qualities: their tree-ishness, a phrase borrowed from the enthusiastic scientific research of tree scientist Harriet Rix. This existential process—achieved by evolutionary twists and hazards—has been shaping earth uniquely and phenomenally and, by that turn, its beauty and stupefying variety. Even our admiration for trees is a learned ability. Their forms have cultivated in us an aesthetic sense, a feel for beauty that attunes us to their extraordinariness as entities in themselves. Enjoying them inclines us to cherish them, a fecund yet neglected loop that emboldens Rix to revisit the deceptively obvious: "The greatest wisdom is understanding that appreciation and conservation are two sides of the same coin." That trees by what they inherently are act upon and enlighten us—magnets of material, movement, and mind.
