The Psychedelic Forest
Edmund Burke
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is Astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror … No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear, being an apprehension of pain or death, operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too … Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.
The Psychedelic Forest draws from van Coller’s expeditions in Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uganda, and the United States.
Ian van Coller’s portraits of nature upend traditional approaches to landscapes. Van Coller has experimented with color, tone and saturation to mimic psychedelic experiences of wild forests and provoke encounters with the sublime. These images of forests from across the world are offerings of awe in defense of the natural world. Some convey the terrifying enormity of biodiverse jungles and others the profound envelopment of cloud forests that forcibly dissolve the divide between humanity and nature. Similarly to how a psychedelic experience blurs boundaries of our physical experience, van Coller’s portraits transport us beyond a customary two-dimensional image to engage our entire sensory spectrum. We feel the cool, damp air as it plays the acoustic trick of muffling ambient sound while amplifying the calls of birds and other creatures. And as in any good psychedelic experience, these images make time feel elastic and changeable.
In “Santa Marta” we enter a contemporary “lost world” and peer into what nature accomplishes when we are not looking. In other images mystical light refracted through both rivers and water vapor reminds us that our visual senses are malleable. In “Arenal” we are tempted to fixate on the vibrancy of a single mushroom, yet in both “Rio Nambi” images we confront the explosive proficiency of life amidst such darkness. That darkness draws us further in, and as our eyes adjust we perceive an astonishing abundance of organisms. Van Coller’s work asks us to contemplate the incomprehensible entanglement of nature, the beautiful and the mysterious, so that we feel inspired to participate and protect what is ultimately an extension of ourselves.