Ghost Forest

Soundcraft at Mesa Contemporary Art Museum

January 23rd to May 31st

Opening reception, free and open to the public, 7-9, February 13th

Special performance by Simone Mancuso, April 16th

I am very excited that I have been invited to exhibit my installation Ghost Forest in SoundCraft at Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, opening reception February 13th. An early iteration of Ghost Forest was presented at last year’s ArtLink gala. I have made additional pieces to complete it, edited a new video to complement the installation, and rethought the audio and interactive components. This is an interactive exhibit– the floor is covered with ink jet prints of soil microbes, branches, and leaves; walking on them offers the sound and sensation of walking on a forest floor. Inside each of the sculptures is a small speaker, place your ear close to hear sounds of a forest — a living forest that’s under stress and threatened. This piece comes out of my work at residencies in Sweden, Finland, and the McDowell Foundation, researching forestry practices and considering the unseen and unheard multitudes of lives, with whom we share a symbiotic entangled existence. AND…on April 16th, I have asked percussionist and composer Simone Mancuso to perform on my work. My sculptures resonate and I have been dreaming of a musician using my sculptures as instruments. The reception for this exhibition and all of Mesa Contemporary Art Museum’s exhibitions is February 13th, 7 pm.  I hope to see you then! and I really hope that you will turn up for Simone’s performance on the 16th of April. I will share details about that on my instagram, @patriciasannitstudio. 

Ceramic, porcelain, multi-channel mp3 audio, single channel video, ink jet prints on paper and vellum. 2025-2026. An interactive installation. Ghost Forest “Deep down, at the molecular heart of life, we and the trees are essentially identical.” –Carl Sagan A ghost forest is the handful of struggling trees that remain in a clearcut, still standing after the logging trucks have gone, the trucks’ loud engines having faded in the distance. It is mostly quiet; few birds call and few insects buzz. Amidst the torn-up ground, hard and rutted by the huge tires of a felling truck, a truck designed to cut and yank trees from the ground, stumps remain, their bark fallen like a dropped skirt around the base. Coming upon a clearcut is startling and disturbing; the forest seems to go on forever, until it doesn’t…a road appears, deep tire tracks furrow the earth, the ground littered with broken branches, broken saplings too small to value, and boundary trees still wrapped with faded plastic logging company tags. The contrast is so stark between the living dense forest, sun glittering through branches, which is so rich in fungus, moss, and lichen, secreting uncountable hidden lives in bark and mulch, and the clearcut.