Twelve large-scale “photographs” document one site-specific tree across one invented year. For the Savannah iteration, the subject is a mature coastal live oak shaped by the ecology and atmosphere of the region. The viewer watches it change, mourns its apparent destruction, and only then learns that the tree never existed.
A single tree is shown from the same fixed point of view once each month, January through December. The images behave like documentary photographs: the camera position is constant, the landscape is continuous, and only season, light, atmosphere, growth and decay appear to change. Each image is paired with a precise time and coordinate, extending the language of photographic evidence into a fabricated field record.
For the Savannah iteration, the subject is a mature coastal live oak: broad, old, regionally plausible, carrying restrained Spanish moss and resurrection fern. But there was no camera. There was no year. There was no tree. Every image is generated through an AI-assisted visual system designed to maintain the identity of one fictional subject over time.
FRAME OF REFERENCE is not built around one universal tree. Each exhibition begins by selecting a mature species native to, or strongly associated with, the region in which the work is shown. The tree’s branching habit, bark, canopy, epiphytes, seasonal behavior and surrounding landscape are developed from the visual ecology of that site.
In Savannah, the work takes the form of a coastal live oak. Spanish moss and resurrection fern appear as restrained ecological details rather than decorative symbols. In another city, the species and seasonal logic would change while the structure of the work remains constant: one fictional individual, one fixed viewpoint, twelve months, one manufactured memory.
The subject is fictional. The ecology is local.
“The artwork does not end where the frame begins.”
In Objectophilia (Animals), Vasata’s 2018 SCAD MFA thesis in Photography, found ceramic objects were photographed, re-objectified, and incorporated into handcrafted illuminated structures. The thesis described this as a closed circuit: the subject becomes an image; the image becomes an object; the frame becomes part of the artwork.
The project also examined animism, anthropomorphism, artificial intelligence, and the viewer’s capacity to assign identity, intention, sympathy and even love to something inanimate. Its central concern was not whether the object was alive, but whether the viewer could experience it as if it were.
FRAME OF REFERENCE extends that research into generative AI: instead of animating an existing object, it creates a subject that never existed and asks whether the viewer can still know it, remember it, and mourn it.
Animate the inanimate.
Manufacture the animate.
The works are installed chronologically as a continuous sequence. Each vertical image is approximately 48 × 60 inches framed, large enough for the tree to read as a physical presence rather than an illustration. The Savannah study below establishes the current visual system: the same live oak, the same camera position, twelve distinct atmospheric records, each carrying its own month, time and coordinate. At the end of the December work, a restrained provenance label—presented as part of the installation’s narrative—states that the depicted tree was felled after the final image and that its wood was milled into the twelve frames. The visitor is allowed to carry that belief forward before encountering the process book.
A familiar photographic language invites trust.
Repetition turns twelve images into a perceived year.
The recurring subject begins to feel known. The viewer watches it endure, change and age.
The viewer is led to believe the tree was felled after the final image and transformed into the frames surrounding its own portraits.
The process book reveals that the photographed tree never existed. The apparent sacrifice collapses—but the real wood frames prove that another tree, unseen by the viewer, entered the work as material.
The exhibition gives the fictional tree what the material tree does not receive: a face, a history, twelve seasons of attention, and a narrative of loss. The viewer is invited to care for the represented tree because it has become familiar. The actual tree used for the frames remains anonymous.
The tree you mourn never existed. The tree that died was never seen.
The project treats generation as a production system rather than a novelty effect. The challenge is not producing twelve attractive tree images. The challenge is preserving identity across them: trunk geometry, major branches, horizon, camera position, spatial relationships and visual character.
The system is also site-responsive: species, seasonal behavior, ground conditions and ecological details are constrained by the exhibition region. For Savannah, continuity includes the live oak’s evergreen character, restrained Spanish moss, resurrection fern, humid summer atmosphere and comparatively subtle winter change.
Fixed visual specificationReference-image controlSeasonal transformationHuman selectionRetouching + consistencyPrint craftThe artist defines what must remain constant and what may change.
The artist generates, compares, rejects, retouches, and selects until twelve images sustain one coherent subject across a year.
Printing, scale, framing, sequencing and the final object turn generated imagery into an authored installation.
The installation is structured as a double reveal. First, a provenance label following the December image presents the frames as material made from the depicted tree after it was felled. The claim is deliberately staged as part of the artwork’s fiction, allowing the visitor to understand the frames as the transformed body of a subject they have just spent a year observing.
Only after that loss has registered does the process book reveal the construction: the tree in the photographs was generated entirely with AI. There was no original tree, no camera, and no year of observation. The apparent victim is fictional. The frames, however, are not. Their documented lumber provenance returns the visitor to a real tree that was never pictured, named, or mourned.
A matching wooden stand holds the process book. Its material language extends the frames into the reading space so that portrait, apparent death, transformation, and memorial initially read as one continuous story.
The book then breaks that story open. The depicted tree is artificial, but the timber is not. AI removes the need to destroy the subject, yet the physical exhibition still depends on extraction from the natural world. The work therefore refuses an easy technological salvation: the image is synthetic, but the material cost remains real.
Can an image function as documentary evidence when the event it documents was synthesized?
How much of remembering depends on factual origin, and how much depends on repeated exposure and narrative continuity?
If AI spares the tree we believe we are mourning, what does it mean that another tree still had to die to make the work physically convincing?
Gutstein offers a particularly apt context for a work that began as SCAD MFA research and now returns as an installation spanning photography, fabrication, and generative technology.
The work begins in a familiar photographic language, unfolds through the physical sequence of the room, and culminates in a reading experience rather than a screen-based technology demonstration.
Research the exhibition ecology; define the local species, landscape, camera, fabricated metadata, season logic and continuity rules.
Generate, select, refine and proof the monthly images as one series.
Produce archival prints, custom frames, book and reading stand.
Sequence for architectural rhythm, sightlines and controlled final reveal.
FRAME OF REFERENCE is presented here as a fully developed exhibition proposal. Final exhibition images, archival prints, single-source hardwood frames, provenance label, process book, and reading stand will be produced as a unified body upon acceptance. The artist will coordinate and assume responsibility for delivery and transportation of the completed work to SCAD Savannah.
My work examines the point at which an image or object begins to behave like something more than itself. I am interested in how photography, fabrication, sound, technology, and narrative can produce recognition, attachment, sympathy, and belief — especially when the thing receiving those emotions is artificial, inanimate, or constructed.
This inquiry began in my 2018 SCAD MFA thesis, Objectophilia (Animals), where found ceramic figurines were photographed and transformed into illuminated, dimensional objects. I described the relationship among subject, photograph, frame, and viewer as a closed circuit: the artwork did not end where the frame began, and the viewer’s emotional relationship to the object became part of the work.
FRAME OF REFERENCE continues that investigation through generative AI. A fictional tree is given continuity, identity, history, and apparent mortality. The viewer is asked to care about something that never existed, then confronted with the physical cost of making that fiction tangible. I am less interested in AI as spectacle than in what it reveals about authorship, empathy, memory, and the material consequences of images.
Jonathan Vasata is an artist, photographer, and creative technologist whose interdisciplinary practice moves between photography, installation, sculpture, sound, design, and emerging technologies. He earned an MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2018.
His graduate thesis, Objectophilia (Animals), investigated animism, objecthood, anthropomorphism, and the emotional relationships viewers form with inanimate things. His current work extends those concerns into generative systems and artificial intelligence, using technological processes as material for questions about authorship, memory, empathy, and what viewers accept as real.
Contact: jonathan@vasata.com · vasata.com
Working titles and specifications for the proposed exhibition. Final image dimensions may be adjusted in consultation with Gutstein Gallery while maintaining a consistent scale across the series.
| No. | Title | Year | Medium | Dimensions | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — January | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 02 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — February | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 03 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — March | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 04 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — April | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 05 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — May | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 06 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — June | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 07 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — July | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 08 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — August | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 09 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — September | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 10 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — October | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 11 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — November | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 12 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — December | 2026–27 | AI-generated image, archival pigment print, custom hardwood frame | Approx. 48 W × 60 H in. framed | $6,500 |
| 13 | FRAME OF REFERENCE — Process Book + Reading Stand | 2026–27 | Bound process volume; custom hardwood reading stand | Dimensions variable | NFS |