Alex Turner: Blind Forest

Following the gallery’s 2023 presentation of Alex Turner’s project Blind River, set in the borderlands of Arizona, the second chapter of this endeavor brings his complex and investigative photographic approach to our own backyard.

Blind Forest by Alex Turner (b. 1984, Chicago) is a cross-disciplinary study of how trees absorb and reflect human and environmental histories. Created in collaboration with ecologists, historians, and anthropologists, the project explores their capacity to reveal shifting climates, cultural values, and systems of power over time. 

Set across California, Blind Forest employs thermal imaging—commonly used in surveillance, fire detection, and tree health assessment—to visualize the conservation, transmission, and dispersion of heat. Each large-scale image is composed from hundreds of thermal exposures, treating heat as both data and narrative: a high-fidelity record of vitality, stress, and decay.

The trees featured here trace enduring tensions between extraction and preservation, survival and erasure, change and continuity. They are both ecological keystones and mirrors of human intent. In this precarious moment, Blind Forest invites us to consider trees not as passive scenery, but as active participants—living archives that conserve, transmit, and disperse meaning across generations.

Artist Statement:

My work navigates the intersections of ecology, technology, and human experience, and Blind Forest embodies this approach through an extended study of trees as both ecological keystones and mirrors of human intent. Set across the diverse landscapes of California, the project uses thermal imaging—a tool of surveillance, fire detection, and tree health assessment—to reveal what lies beyond the visible: the conservation, transmission, and dispersion of heat through living systems.

Created in collaboration with ecologists, natural historians, and cultural anthropologists, Blind Forest reflects a cross-disciplinary inquiry into how natural systems absorb, reflect, and archive cultural and natural histories. Using a thermal hunting scope mounted on a panoramic tripod head, I construct large-scale images from hundreds of exposures, mapping thermodynamic activity in precise detail. In doing so, I treat heat not just as data, but as narrative—a record of vitality, decay, stress, and transition. Trees are long-living witnesses to environmental and human histories, and they carry evidence of shifting climates, displaced communities, and evolving systems of power in their bark, roots, and canopies.

From junipers and pinyon pines valued by Indigenous communities, to redwoods logged for empire and citrus groves that once symbolized prosperity, the species featured in Blind Forest trace overlapping tensions—extraction and preservation, survival and erasure, change and continuity. Blind Forest questions what it means to see—and what is made visible or concealed through the tools we use to understand the world. Thermal imaging extends human perception but also implicates us in systems of control. By turning this apparatus toward the forest, I aim to collapse the distance between scientific observation and poetic witnessing, rendering the unseen visible and inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship to place, memory, and environmental urgency.

Ultimately, Blind Forest asks how we document and understand the slow, often invisible forces that shape our surroundings. It positions trees not as passive scenery, but as active participants—living archives that conserve, transmit, and disperse meaning across generations. In a moment of ecological precarity, Blind Forest prompts reflection on the fragile systems we inherit, inhabit, and either sustain or destroy.

- Alex Turner, Los Angeles