Australian artist Konstantin Dimopoulos is in King County this week and next working on his project, The Blue Trees. He takes a moment to explain his thinking and process:

As artists we change our environment continually through our particular practice. Whether painting on canvas, creating sculptures or a digital artwork we take reality and alter it. You, the viewer, then see this altered world through our eyes.

The Blue Trees takes an urban landscape with which you are familiar and changes it for a brief period of time so that it becomes something unfamiliar, even uncomfortable.

We are creatures who like certainty and we become disconcerted when our environment changes. Yet we have altered and destroyed much of the global environment. With this destruction we have caused the extinction of countless species.

The primordial forests of the world are disappearing at an alarming rate. It is easy to restore the trees we have colored blue back to their natural state, but without some serious efforts the old species including Redwoods, Sequoias, Kauris, Oak, Beech and all the classes they support will disappear. The do not have the option of restoration.

The Blue Trees is part of a wider question that I ask – Can Art Save The World?  Maybe not on its own, but it can generate thinking and discussion throughout the global community.

Somewhere in this debate there are people who will come up with the answers. I also hope that my work inspires others in their work – as it has with the young award-winning filmmaker, Miranda Andersen from Vancouver with her short video about The Blue Trees when it was created for the Vancouver Biennale in 2011.