In 2010, Roberley Bell went looking for nature in the ever-expanding urban environment of Istanbul, Turkey where she was living on a Fulbright. Bell photographed trees and paired them with vintage portraits, found in bookshops, of individuals or families photographed in the company of a tree. She returned to Istanbul in 2014 after the Gezi Park demonstrations of the previous year, which began as a protest of the government’s desire to remove the park and replace it with a mall. She attempted to relocate and re-photograph the trees from her original project going on searches requiring maps, memory, and strangers’ directions. In the Project Space, Bell will work with her photo documentation to recreate the daily maps on which she transcribed the narrative of each encounter as she searched out the trees.

Roberley Bell’s work centers on the production of sculpture and site specific public projects. She explores the natural world both in abstracting from, and in borrowing, to reveal hyper-realized fantastical forms and landscapes. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from SUNY College of Ceramics at Alfred and is a professor in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at RIT.