About the artist: Sam Nester’s Greene Block + Studios installation “Arcadia”

Sam Nester, a multimedia artist and musician, created an inaugural installation called “Arcadia” for Greene Block + Studios. The immersive construction includes potted and planted foliage surrounded by wood chips, with a pristine path on the hardwood floor.

Throughout the exhibition, branches stand in as trees, potted plants have grown, a bush is flowering, and subtle details such as a bird’s nest glow in the sunshine streaming through the windows facing Main Street.

The calm space contains pieces of the Perkins Arboretum in September. 

“Everything inside that space was indeed outside in the woods surrounding Waterville, but somehow it seems different now that it is recontextualized inside the downtown space,” Nester said. 

Greene Block + Studios was designed for experimental projects that bring people together to share, study, and celebrate the arts. This use of the space is creatively contradictory, according to the artist. 

“The inside has offered me a frame to host the outside world as art,” Nester said. 

It is the latest in a series of Nester’s experimental nature-based installations unique to their locations,including a Manhattan greenhouse, a Tasmanian rainforest, a New York City gallery, and a display at George Mason University. 

Each project involves an intense focus on the local natural landscape surrounding the display. 

“All versions of the installation have been unique, utilizing the changing location to help inspire each outcome. Similar to the version currently living at Greene Block + Studios, these installations often feature local native plants that create the constant stream of sound and light that audiences experience,” Nester explained. 

The experiential exhibit includes sound, light, video, plants, and technology in a closed space. Nester sought to create “a passive experience of the Perkins in late summer, while Arcadia acts as a physical trail walk, as if bringing the meandering experience of the arboretum from the outside in.” 

The repotted forest invites perusing like an art exhibit and can provide a small outdoorsy stroll with added contemplation. 

The format is meant to shift the audience’s experience of the outdoors by placing familiar trees and greenery in a startling setting. It is a unique and original format for visiting a forest. “Bringing the natural environment inside changes our experience of it, makes us more aware of it, and offers us a moment of recalibration to perceive it in a new way,” Nester elaborated. 

While a nature walk is a lovely way to reset outdoors, the convenience of an indoor forest floor in the middle of downtown Waterville should appeal to busy students and residents. The installation borrows the structure and style of the arboretum, a familiar favorite outdoor space on campus. 

In order to relocate a piece of the arboretum indoors, the installation’s technology creates a peaceful environment echoing nature, and amplifies the sounds of a stream, birds, frogs and insects inhabiting the woods. 

The most technical addition is the sonification of the local forest’s native plants, or, more simply, an audible interpretation of the plants’ inner processes. Nester explained how the biodata is converted in a digital audio workstation called Ableton Live. 

Recordings of the native plants’ biorhythms fill the space with synthetic electronic forest sonification, or the sounds of the functions of living plants. An eight-speaker audio system lets sound flow through the space and fills it from all directions with whimsical tones representing the plants. The resulting show surrounds the audience in an immersive environment, not simply an art installation. For an added ethereal element, changing colorful lights fill the brightroom. The artist calls it “an ever-changing ephemeral effect, and spatially unique experience.” 

It is a seasonal exhibition, and a lot of the labor and design involved collaboration with Teresa McKinney, Diamond Family Director of the Arts at Colby, who commissioned Sam Nester, and Sarah Fagg on staff in the Arts Office at Greene Block + Studios. 

Nester envisioned the purpose of the exhibition as “bringing the environment from the background around us into the foreground at a critical time for environmental awareness.” 

It is certainly a space for environmental contemplation. The clean industrial building on busy Main Street contrasts the organic pause this installation provides. 

Nester assembled “Arcadia” as a space to bring the serenity and natural elements people seek outdoors into an arts space, to connect anyone in the community who visits, and to inspire the artistic mind with an indoor environment of nature. 

“By taking inspiration from the natural environment that is readily available to Colby students, staff, faculty, and the Waterville community, and hosting it as the centerpiece of an artistic experience, my hope is that visitors will spend time in quiet contemplation, reflecting on their own relationship to the natural world,” Nester said. 

“Arcadia” is open to the public 11a.m.–7p.m. from Sept. 28 – Oct. 29 in the lobby of 18 Main Street.

~ Molly George `23