Tree Dreams: Interactive Forest Art

Dakota Lane is featured in two Hudson Valley shows in June.

Tree Dreams at the Old Dutch goes up first week in June and remains until end of July. Please note that party and reception is 1-3 pm, July 6.

Gallery hours are: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday 10 to 3 or by appointment.

Her solo show at the Old Dutch Church Gallery in Kingston represents a decade of work. Tree Dreams  is a transmedia exhibition, inviting the viewer into a private and personal forest journey exploring themes of resiliency, recovery and growth. The artist  has spent thousands of hours alone in the forests of the Hudson Valley, photographing and connecting with all the elements of the wild world. 

The show includes more than 25 pieces, including two mini-installations, a visual memoir, and new monoprints.  Photographs of special places and animal encounters in the Hudson Valley, excerpts from an illustrated Woodstock memoir, ritual paper objects and hand-painted prose offer the sense of peering into a personal journal. Interactive  pieces invite viewers to explore their own connections with the woods.

Dakota Lane is a longtime Hudson Valley teaching artist,  young adult author and NY Times journalist/videographer. She spent thousands of hours alone in the forest, including time spent as a fellow at Yaddo and in retreat as a Tibetan Buddhist student.

As director of the Resiliency Project, she developed a word and image curriculum around forests and teaches this to underserved and emergency communities, in shelters and in transitional housing as well as in therapeutic settings.

She facilitated a concurrent show, called Bloom: Symbols of Resiliency, at WAAM in Woodstock, (June 7–August 11),  representing  recent work she did with underserved youth in the mid-Hudson Valley.