Johnathan Onyschuk: Old Growth

Project Space Old Growth emerges from a persistent image that appears across time and geography: a human face materializing from, or intertwined with, plant matter. From architectural carving motifs in Medieval churches across Europe or in temple complexes ranging from 2nd Century Hatra to 8th Century Rājasthān, to illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, costuming, mosaics, or metalwork, the recurrence of faces in plant form has long existed as a human expression. In the present, spanning workshops and gardens, as well as hobbyist, artistic, and folk traditions, the impulse repeats: to bring together the human and the vegetal.

This installation begins with that repetition. Johnathan Onyschuk has accumulated a collection of anonymous “spirit carvings,” or traditional folk art pieces depicting human faces (often bearded, weathered, and wizened) cut into pieces of wood. He has subsequently merged these found sculptures into composite basswood reliefs. The individual faces dissolve into one another, and accumulate into dense, swirling patterned surfaces where features emerge and recede. What comes together is not a singular figure, but an assembly of characters: an entanglement of individual gestures, histories, and expressions held within wood.

Old Growth invites a speculative question: why does the human face return, again and again, to this material? One answer might lie in a search for recognition. Since human and plant life share a distant evolutionary kinship, could these carvings be understood less as acts of representation or of an attempt to capture likeness, but instead as efforts to re-establish contact with our botanical relatives? What if the human face is not imposed onto the wood, but discovered within it? Could the act of recovering these faces actually offer a form of communication – or even of reunion?