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FRAMED BY WEATHER
WATERSHED ART AND ECOLOGY, 2025
CHICAGO
SCULPTED FRAMED, DENDRCLIMATOLOGY DATA FROM WOOD IN FRAME, PAPER AND TEXT
Framing Weather reimagines the frame—not as a neutral boundary or passive support, but as the work itself. Macia sculpts each frame from tropical wood, embedding within it the cross-section of a tree, where dendroclimatological data is inscribed in rings shaped by decades of climate. These concentric marks form a living archive of environmental rhythms, each variation in width or density reflecting shifts in rainfall, temperature, and cycles of light.
From this biological record, Macia maps and translates the tree’s memory into sinetic lines, which are then filled with micro text to create sinethic patterns—visual scripts born from the dialogue between growth and climate. The embedded poem in these lines draws from Anillos, Clima y Actividad Solar by Colombian dendroclimatologist Jorge Andrés Giraldo, who was the first to identify eighty species in wet tropical forests capable of providing reliable chronologies. His discovery overturned decades of scientific consensus that tree-ring chronology was only possible in climates with marked seasons. The poem reflects this shift in understanding: in the tropics, time is not measured by the rhythm of seasons, but by the movement of light.
In the history of art, the frame has often been relegated to the role of servant: an ornamental edge, a protective casing, or a means of separating the pictorial space from the world beyond it. The modernist impulse to “break the frame” sought to dissolve this separation, while conceptual art often abandoned the frame altogether. Framing Weather proposes another path: to inhabit the frame, to understand it as an active, material witness to history. Here, the frame is not a boundary to the artwork—it is the site where planetary history is held, revealed, and made visible.
By embedding climate into the very perimeter of vision, the work asserts that environment is not backdrop but the frame of life itself. In doing so, it asks us to consider that every act of framing—whether in art, photography, architecture, or thought—carries with it a choice about what histories, ecologies, and temporalities are brought into view.