The Arboreal Life is an exhibition of new paintings by Katie DeGroot that transform trees into expressive figures, staged in scenes that reflect human relationships with nuance and humor. Each tree is painted from life at scale, defined as an individual marked with scars, growths, knots, and kinks that reveal its uniqueness and individual history. The anthropomorphized personas are then placed in situations that suggest human interaction—family gatherings, conversations between couples, cocktail parties, or in a solo scene by themselves.
